Insomnia
by Tendency
Summary: It's a bad sign when you start to feel cold in July - not that you have to worry now. Domino hits a heat wave, Jounouchi can't get any sleep, nobody can keep the power on, and if Kaiba acts any weirder, the world really will end. -Joukai, complete.-
1. Parasol

**Summary:** It's a bad sign when you start to feel cold in July--not that you have to worry now. Domino hits a heat wave, Jounouchi can't get any sleep, nobody can keep the power on, and if Kaiba acts any weirder, the world really will end.  
**Rating:** R  
**Pairings:** Kaiba/Jounouchi.  
**Type:** Multi part, DF.  
**WARNINGS:** Some disturbing imagery, explicit mentions of past disturbing content, people getting punched in the nose.  
**Disclaimer:** Yuugiou is the sole property of Takahashi Kazuki, Shōnen Jump (Japan and America), VIZ Media, Konami, and those bastards at 4Kids who dubbed all the joy out of it for stupid Americans.  
**Masterpost (music, notes, etc.):** h t t p : / / t e n i k a . l i v e j o u r n a l . c o m / 8 1 7 9 1 . h t m l

**Notes:** Okay. So this is many things, including an examination of insomnia as a psychological phenomenon, a sort of lame experiment with magical realism, a fresh chapter in my enduring and stupid quest to place Yuugiou in the real world, and also a thinly-veiled response of rage to the fandom fail trope of forgetting that Yuugiou takes place in Japan. SERIOUSLY, GUYS: I know 4Kids really fucked up dubbing it, but come on. Domino = a really sparkly Tokyo. Really. (Also, for the purposes of this fic, that equation is actually real; I've essentially written this in late-90s Tokyo, though the name Domino has been retained, as well as some of its amazing wtf factor. You heard me say magical realism, right? Right.)

Please ignore all cultural wanking and accept every scene in a spirit of loving good fun. And if you can't do that, go away. Also, please enjoy the gay. Chapters will be followed by notes as I feel them necessary. Honorifics have been retained for the sake of accuracy, particularly with respect to Jounouchi's character (that is, identifying the rare souls he actually addresses with -kun, -chan, -sensei, etc.). Also, I'm operating strictly within the manga verse here, and only through Duelist Kingdom. This fic is officially DF after that point. I apologize if you liked Kaiba's white jacket of insanity, but I'm excising all hijinks après Pegasus for this verse, in the interests of focusing the story more on characters and relationships than crazy awesome monster fights.

Special gooey thanks to Tyries and Tikia for their extra-awesome betas and comments.

-

**Start One**  
**_Parasol_**

So this was the thing.

Jounouchi _hated_ tests.

The only thing Jounouchi hated more than tests were exams, and the only thing he hated more than _exams_ was the first half of July, when all the teachers at Domino High inevitably came to the unanimous conclusion that they were about to lose their students to a full month of summer vacation, and that obviously the most important thing to do before this could happen was spend the last week leading up to the twenty first _testing the holy fuck out of them_. Specifically by giving them six straight days of mock examinations.

Now, this sucked even in a normal year, but senior year officially set the bar. They were, after all, not only getting ready for graduation, but for exam hell itself, when ninety five percent of the student body of Japan went swinging into the life-and-death struggle of racking up scores on the National Center Test that would ultimately determine not just their future choice of college, but also their _entire future_.

No pressure, though.

Jounouchi, ever practical, had been resigned since his first day of high school to focusing strictly on graduation, foregoing college in favor of getting a job right away. He'd be one of only a very tiny minority to do it, but so what? His chances of working out a way to afford college were slight at best--and besides, he wasn't nearly smart enough to test into any of the good places, and sure as hell not smart enough to do most of the career work those places would qualify him for.

But in his second year of high school, on what was probably the stupidest night of his life, Jounouchi had made a promise to Honda and Yuugi--who _were_ planning on taking the National Center Test--to take it with them, and to do his damndest to go to the same college as them. He'd hoped they would forget about it later, once the insanity of the moment had faded, but this was apparently too much to ask of the universe. They had been holding him to it all year, and Jounouchi, who never went back on his word, had been trying to do the same.

Jounouchi, however, forgot things a lot. He forgot them easily, and he tended to forget them for a long, long time. So in the periods between their prompting, he turned his focus to other things; there were bills to pay, after all, and part-time jobs to work, his father's debts to whittle away at, gang wars to avoid, games to win, food to get. Jounouchi was a busy guy.

So when July of his senior year rolled around and Jounouchi realized that the hellish period of mock exams was fast approaching, he got a little nervous. Then he went back to his work and forgot again.

And then _way the hell out of nowhere_ it was Friday the seventh, nighttime, and Jounouchi had a pre-exam test in the morning. So he pulled an all-nighter and studied, failed the test, and went to his last day of work before summer vacation proper, having gotten the next two weeks off for school.

That was where it all started, really.

To say that it had been an accident right from the beginning was nothing but the truth. Of course, that was the excuse he'd used for a lot of things in his life--_honest, it was an accident_--but this time it seriously had been. _Seriously_. If he'd known at the start the way things would ultimately unravel, he probably would have reconsidered the doing part of most of what he'd done. Or at least taken some time to laugh at himself beforehand.

But it had honestly started as a one-night thing. It hadn't seemed harmful in the least, even just potentially. After all, an all-nighter was by definition supposed to _end_ after one night, not expand and decide to be innovative by going on and on and fucking _on_.

Jounouchi by his very nature was intimately acquainted with all-nighters, them being the norm for people who chose to catch a lot of their sleep during school hours. But that Saturday night, the night of his bombed test and failed efforts, Jounouchi got into bed and closed his eyes and...couldn't sleep.

He laid in his futon for hours, hours and _hours_, eyes closed, and every time he looked at his alarm clock he found a little more time whittled away, a little more of an ache in his eyes, and no apparent inclination on the part of his brain to hurry up and fix that.

Then suddenly it was Sunday, and for maybe half an hour in the afternoon Jounouchi dozed, a fitful and unpleasant sleep. The same thing happened shortly after dinner, two thin hours full of strange dreams, and though he woke up able to uncross his eyes, he still didn't feel _rested_. By Sunday night he was exhausted, he was crabby, he had only one week left to get ready for the start of mocks on the seventeenth, and because the bureaucracy of Domino was composed entirely of sadistic _bastards_, Obon was starting on the thirteenth, meaning he'd _also_ have to figure out how he was going to make time to get to the festival on the fifteenth in between all the studying and freaking out.

But first he had to sleep.

A driver in the street below Jounouchi's window honked twice at something, grasping at some shred of politesse, then abruptly threw tact out the window and laid on the horn, simultaneously waking up and pissing off half the block of shabby apartments in the process. Within seconds his head was throbbing in time with it, the horrible, mechanical whine pushing fingers into his eardrums, endless; one continuous, numbing ache. Jounouchi squeezed his eyes shut, drew in a breath, and groaned.

Voicing his discomfort again (once wasn't enough, really), Jounouchi turned over and over and over a third time on his futon, shuddering as his skin stuck unpleasantly to the single cheap comforter. The air smelled thick and like sweat, and Jounouchi, though exhausted and sore from a long day and distantly hungry and _unbelievably_ tired, was beginning to realize that lightning wasn't going to strike tonight, either. Which made this officially the first case of insomnia he'd ever had in his life.

To top it all off, a heat wave had rolled into Domino about a week earlier (week and a half? Hell, he couldn't remember), and he'd spent all the nights since soaked through, even the ones before his insomnia. He was seriously considering moving to the bare floor at this point, but that would mean he'd actually have to clear a spot amidst all the papers and dirty clothes and game magazines from Yuugi, which would require more excavation than he was really feeling up to at the moment, thanks but no thanks.

It was a rut. It was a rut and he knew it, but he didn't know how to get _out_ of it. How were you supposed to force yourself to sleep when your brain just wouldn't believe that you were exhausted? He couldn't afford pills, and anyway, those things fucked people up. But it was two AM now, Monday morning, and he _really_ needed to be at class in six hours. He had no problem with sleeping there, but the issue was sleeping _now_. He _wanted_ to sleep now, and it simply wasn't happening.

This just wasn't cosmically fair. Jounouchi had been fulfilling a promise, trying his best, devoting himself for once to doing the things he was expected to do. He'd felt pretty proud of himself at the time.

Now he just felt stupid. Stupid and _really_ fucking tired.

And he was _still_ sweaty.

"Fuck it," he muttered to his ceiling, kicking the blanket into a rumpled wad at the foot of his futon and rolling out onto the floor. This wasn't much of an improvement, considering that he was still sweaty, and now stuck to a bunch of papers instead of his blanket, but it was a start.

Lying face down, Jounouchi sniffed at the paper resting closest to his nose. Placing it after a short moment as his most recent math exam (it smelled like cigarettes, and Sadamoto-sensei was the only one who smoked while grading work, even if he lied about it), he counted tersely to three, then pushed himself up to his knees and finally his feet, bracing himself for the inevitable wave of dizziness.

It was stronger than he had expected, sending him reeling to his left for a few dragging seconds, until he could close his eyes and center himself. When he felt balanced again he took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the light coming through his window from the street lamp outside, the dark shapes scattered about his room coming slowly into focus; his floor lamp, his papers and books, his school bag in one corner, and over it all a light dusting of old clothes.

Working a finger beneath the waistband of his boxers, Jounouchi scratched his hip for a few seconds, yawned, then grabbed the first relatively clean tank top he could find. Tugging that on, he found a pair of ragged jeans to match (he was pretty sure he'd seen a hole opening up below the left half of the ass part a day or two ago, but if people were curious, he wasn't going to object to a little public boxer exhibition) and threw on a pair of sandals to top it off. Reasonably--if not fashionably--dressed, Jounouchi grabbed his wallet from behind the peeling molding on the hinge-edge of the doorframe, yawned again, and headed into the main room of the apartment.

Hell with trying to sleep. At this point he figured his best option would probably be to walk around until he was too exhausted to move, at which point he could drag himself to school and bum his way into the nurse's office for a few hours of sleep. Or, even better, just walk around until he passed out and was (hopefully) dragged into an alley by a generous pedestrian. That would cut school out of the equation entirely, which would be...kind of cool, actually, Yuugi and Honda's irritation temporarily aside. He'd probably stink, but so what?

Peering at the couch, Jounouchi found that his dad hadn't come home yet, and wrinkled his nose. He'd have to leave the door unlocked. Doing this always made him instinctively uneasy, though he knew they didn't own anything worth stealing, except maybe a few family photographs and an empty blue and white bottle that had once contained souvenir Tequila from America. His dad claimed it had been a wedding gift. Jounouchi couldn't say he believed that, but it was nice enough that he'd considered selling it on occasion. Nostalgia for the pre-separation days was ultimately the only thing that kept him from carrying that thought through.

The hall outside the tiny apartment looked as dismal as ever, though slightly less awful in the dark. The only illumination came from weak light thrown in through the windows over the stairs at the far end, wide patches of shadow helping to mask dirty walls and cracking plaster. Eight years of living in the same building had given him enough knowledge of the bad spots in the floor to let him navigate them in the dark, moving in an efficient, quiet shuffle toward the stairs themselves.

Out on the street he managed to catch the tail end of a glorious, moving breeze, and for roughly three seconds was able to lift his arms and shudder at the wonderful coolness. Then it was gone, and he was back at ground zero, hot and miserable and standing with his arms out like some kind of psycho Christian on a slum sidewalk in the asscrack of an otherwise perfect city.

Put that way, he had to admit that his life sounded both shockingly depressing and hysterically funny. Unfortunately, neither point was earning him any sleep. He put his arms down and moved on.

-

It was basically an equal number of blocks in all directions before the neighborhoods and businesses began to improve in Jounouchi's portion of the city, which was without a doubt the lowest income area (he'd wondered a lot as a kid how it was that they'd ended up in the middle of it all, but not so much these days). Eventually he headed west on a whim, moving under the spectral shadows of once-attractive apartment complexes and mini-marts with cracked windows, billboards and elaborate graffiti. Some of the best taggers in the area lived near him, acquaintances from his days with Hirutani, and in the past he'd followed along occasionally to watch them at work, curious.

His favorite piece was one close to the edge of their neighborhood that coated the entire underside of a highway overpass; a huge, grotesque hell screen done in the old style, just like ones he'd seen in temples on holidays as a kid. The shunga somebody had put on the side of a Catholic outpost, however, was unforgettable in its own way, particularly since the thing never fucking _died_. For years he'd seen the missionaries white washing the wall over and over again, only to find their work undone within a few weeks. Eventually they'd just given up, and there it had stayed ever since, obscene and hysterical, and probably symbolic of something, though damned if Jounouchi could put it into words.

Having lived in this area for such a long time, Jounouchi was actually more comfortable here than anywhere else, but after his last break with Hirutani, they had come to the unspoken agreement that so long as the gang leader left him the fuck alone, Jounouchi wouldn't wander the streets within his turf late at night. This had worked out pretty well so far, though it had occasionally forced Jounouchi to explore parts of the city that he'd never had any interest in before.

Eventually the dismal sights of his own area shook out into the neater, cleaner lines of fresh food markets, cyber cafés and maid cafés, game parlors, restaurants, and finally changed into massive multi-storied business buildings and high-end coffee shops, bookstores and retails outlets, shopping malls and foreign stores. There were people in these areas no matter the hour, something that had shocked him as a kid, when his dad had first dragged him into the city from Iruma-shi after the separation. They'd never had enough money to live in such a busy place before that point (which had been part of the problem, if Jounouchi remembered right), but it seemed in the aftermath that his dad simply preferred to be poor here instead of in his family house.

Or maybe he was just ashamed to live there after everything that had happened, with all the ghosts of four generations of his family watching. Or maybe the company for old alcoholic fuck-ups was just better in Domino. Jounouchi had never really been able to figure it out. He'd never really wanted to try. He couldn't remember enough of Iruma-shi now to miss it, but even as a kid he'd understood that whatever the reason, his father had ultimately done nothing more than run away. It would have made him sad if it hadn't pissed him off so much.

But what the hell was he doing wasting brain space on this? The past was past. Fuck thinking about it. Jounouchi refocused determinedly on the outside world, frowning at his own weird behavior. It was probably just the insomnia screwing with his head. Didn't people start to hallucinate if they stayed awake too long? Jounouchi shuddered at the thought, hoping he wouldn't be up long enough to find out.

Though he had no idea for how long, when he at last looked around clearly, he found that he had stalled beside a long stretch of brick wall separating an office building from a bank. Across the street, the lights of a fancy coffee shop and an equally fancy tea house blinked, half-dimmed with respect to the hour.

A woman in a light summer kimono walked by--a wave pattern, he noticed, and wondered if the world was secretly mocking him, putting water somewhere so utterly out of reach in this ridiculous heat--and shot a pointed glance at his clothes. He grinned back, flashing a cheerful peace sign, unable to help himself; unsurprisingly scandalized, she turned quickly away and drifted across the street, headed for the tea house.

So what was _her_ problem? She couldn't be doing anything reputable either, going to a tea house at this hour in full kit...Jounouchi snorted quietly, dropping backwards to lean against the wall. His tank top slid with an only half-dry whisper against the advertisements layering the brick face, the parts he'd already sweated through dragging somewhat more.

And then it wasn't enough to lean, really--sitting was the thing. So he let his body slide down, until he could rest with his back to the wall, his legs stretched out across the sidewalk before him.

People passing by began to glare immediately, irritated by the obstruction, but Jounouchi ignored them, basking temporarily in the relief of being off his feet. The air was fractionally cooler closer to the ground, though not nearly enough to take the pressure off his head.

He really didn't know what was wrong with him. Insomnia had never been a problem before--he wouldn't have even thought about it as a possibility three days ago, let alone a probability. When he was tired he slept, and when he wasn't he stayed awake; it was as simple as that. Except now it wasn't.

Drumming his heels in boredom, Jounouchi cracked his jaw and crossed his arms behind his head, glancing up casually at the advertisements on the wall above him. They were numerous, bold kana in a rainbow of colors and styles, some cursive and completely incomprehensible to him...and right over his head was a game poster.

How had he _not_ noticed that five minutes ago? Excited, Jounouchi leaned forward and twisted around, ignoring the dizziness to peer at it. Rectangular and all black, with the exception of the characters and a single object floating in a spotlight in the middle, it was certainly one of the boldest pieces up there, if not the easiest to read in the relatively low light.

Then he actually _recognized_ the trademark style, and almost tore the thing off the wall.

_From Kaiba Corporations_, it read dramatically (_Fucker!_ his mind shouted, _Fucker, fucker, fucker..._), _creator of the Duel Disk© and legendary 3-D Dueling System©, comes a new adventure..._

This led to the item in the spotlight, which was, from the looks of it, a set of gold scales, a single white feather delicately placed in the left pan.

_AMMIT_ read the title printed just below the picture, followed underneath by the small, plainly typed phrase, _this Christmas season..._

Intrinsic asshole vibes temporarily ignored, Jounouchi couldn't help feeling like he was missing something about the whole thing, and particularly about the scales. It took a long moment, however, for him to work out what this was--probably an embarrassingly long moment considering the amount of involvement he'd had in Yuugi's weird-ass life these last few years.

The design was Egyptian, from the curve of the scales to the title itself. He figured he'd heard it somewhere before (probably the guy in the turban had brought it up--it sounded like it would fit right in with the kind of mystical name-dropping he'd liked so much), but he was more preoccupied at that second with hating Kaiba's guts with a breath-wrenching intensity for sinking low enough to cash in on their lives for some crappy video game. There was no way Yuugi _hadn't_ inspired this one, and Jounouchi couldn't see him credited anywhere.

_Fucker_.

-

Distantly Jounouchi remembered a happier time in his life as a boy of thirteen and fourteen; a time when, fresh-faced and innocent, he had enjoyed Kaiba's games without limit, free from any knowledge of what an utter prick the creator would turn out to be.

Even now he remembered those years with almost perfect clarity. Neither had been the best for him in terms of not doing things he would later come to regret, but they had nevertheless made up for that by being, in a number of really relevant ways, his most stable ones; things with the gang and Hirutani had more or less settled into a routine, he'd at last perfected the art of hating his dad without feeling guilty for it, and Kaiba Seto had never tangibly existed. They'd been going to the same middle school, of course, but he and Honda had been in a different class from the rest of them.

Then came high school, and Yuugi and Anzu, and out of nowhere Hirutani had developed a love as huge as Mt. Fuji for his growing reputation, and expressed it by staking a claim over the entirety of Jounouchi's neighborhood, trying to turn himself into a minor lord. In the end he'd managed to do both that and transform into the biggest dick on the planet, and he'd wanted Jounouchi to go along for the ride. Fortunately Jounouchi had recognized what a bad idea that would be even then, but it had still been hard, hard to get out and harder still to stay out.

Things had broken through with his father not long after, having escalated for years, until Jounouchi had at last been forced to admit that for all he couldn't respect him after everything that had happened, he also couldn't hate him just for the sake of hating him. He was only human. A fucking sad, _pathetic_ human, but human all the same. It made it a hell of a lot harder to live with him, but recently Jounouchi had begun to realize that maybe that was better. They didn't talk, but Jounouchi stopped locking him out at night, and every now and again the old man brought a little money home instead of just taking a lot away.

And then, just as he'd finally survived fifteen, just as he'd started to really believe that it was possible to get over wanting to beat the shit out of people on a regular basis, Kaiba Seto had showed up, and everything had gone to fuck overnight.

Within hours the guy had become his living, breathing test from Shakyamuni to prove that he had really gotten over his old ways. And so it was that six days a week, eleven months a year, for the last _three years_, Jounouchi had been tested. Sometimes he'd failed, sometimes he'd passed with extra points, sometimes he'd almost, _almost_ been able to see eye-to-eye with the asshole; but mostly he just wished he'd never met him. It wasn't really in him to hate for very long, but Kaiba had the unique ability to make him want to try.

There was just no way he could be _human_--and if there was, Jounouchi didn't want to know about it. Somewhere in the back of his skull he knew it was true, that Kaiba ate and breathed like the rest of them, that his devotion to his brother was real. But that wasn't a Kaiba Jounouchi wanted to be familiar with, because if he ever got there, he was almost certain he'd feel sorry for him, and it was kind of nice to have at least one person in his life to blame for everything that went wrong. Kaiba even owned half the world, which meant that half the time he did this, he'd probably be right. That kind of assurance only came along once in a lifetime.

All philosophy aside, however, what Jounouchi missed the most was being able to play Kaiba's games innocently, skipping school to screw around on a friend's computer and feel like a hero for a few hours. And in the end, _that_ was probably what he hated most about Kaiba; that for all he came off as a total dickweed in person, he obviously knew enough about people to keep them entertained, which of course meant that he wasn't _incapable_ of treating the people around him well. He just didn't feel like trying.

Jounouchi bit his lip, slumping down a little more and wondering why it was that no matter what he did, Kaiba always figured out some way to ruin it for him, even something as small as a walk in the middle of the small hours of the morning, and even when he was nowhere in sight.

This, however, was the point at which the universe chose to remind Jounouchi of something he'd figured out a long time ago; that being that whenever a guy (or girl--whatever) spent a lot of time thinking about a person, that guy (/girl) would, without fail, run across that person in the immediate future. That was just the way shit went down in his world experience. Likewise, it was an even bigger rule that when a guy spent a lot of time _obsessing_ over someone, that person wouldn't just show up, he'd fucking _trip_ over himself (or herself--fuck gender politics, anyway) to leap out of the woodworks.

Which was probably why Kaiba stepped out of the coffee shop across the street right then.

_end one_

**end notes  
**- Okay, so first a few notes on the Japanese school year: it begins in April and runs until March. Furthermore, it gives a lot fewer breaks. Summer break is by far the longest, and even that only runs from July 21st to August 28th (my birthday! :D); Golden Week in May is another of the lengthier breaks. Further-furthermore, the traditional school week runs from Monday to Saturday, not Friday. So basically _you live at school_.

The National Center Test, also mentioned, is a bit like the SATs in the States: that is, it's a standardized series of exams on various topics (math, biology, language/literature, etc.) that yield scores which the student will then offer to various colleges, along with the scores they receive on the individual entrance exams of those institutions. Depending on the prospective school a student might only take one or two of the Center exams. (Note on the note: all of the above is in tenuous flux currently in Japan--falling population is creating a rather alarming quota deficit, which in turn has led to lowered testing standards. But for the purposes of this fic, which takes place in the late 90s/early 00s, exam hell and the Center Test are still very relevant, insofar as they really do determine whether one can continue on to a university--don't forget all the competition, guys--or go to a vocational school or simply graduate and work construction for the rest of time.) The vast majority of students attempt to get into only a few top universities; those who fail to get into their top choice and decide to retake the Center Test the following year are called ronin.

- Probably everybody knows what a futon is, but what the hell: a futon is that padded cloth mattress you see all the time in manga with the really thick blanket on top (easily researched), often hilariously featured in Takahashi Rumiko's manga Maison Ikkoku. There's kind of a trend in more recent manga/anime of giving characters Western beds, but somehow I can't imagine Jounouchi's dad springing for one of those.

- There will be various clashing religious themes throughout this, by which I do not mean to give the impression that various characters will be proselytizing. Rather, I mean simply that Jounouchi as I'm writing him here has grown up in a country where Christianity/Catholicism is practiced consistently by less than one half a percent of the country's population. This means that he'll not only think of Christians as inherently separate, but will have an overall world view that has been intrinsically informed by Shinto and Buddhist practices. This is an underlying theme in the fic, but keep in mind that when he says things like 'oh my god', he means spirits, or Enma-sama, or Shakyamuni Buddha.

- Shunga are erotic illustrations. These were incredibly popular during the Edo period, particularly among women. Easily and hilariously googled.

- On Jounouchi's dad being ashamed to live in his family home because of how badly he'd screwed up his family: remember what I said two paragraphs ago about differing world views? Welcome to the wonderful practice of ancestor worship.

- Various kimono patterns are deemed appropriate for various months: the wave pattern is thus allotted to July. (Also, _no_, no reputable tea house would be open that late. Just go with it.)

- Ammit is the Egyptian beast of judgment--or, to put it more accurately, she's the monster who eats your soul very gruesomely if your heart fails Ma'at's feather test. With the head of a crocodile, the torso of a lioness, and the bottom half of a hippopotamus, she represented all those animals the Ancient Egyptians most feared. Something of a paradox, as she is viewed as both demonic (because of her physical composition) and necessary (for the removal of evil spirits).


	2. Pair of Fish

**Start Two**  
**_Pair of Fish_**

Running into Kaiba that morning was absolutely not Jounouchi's fault, all questions of obsession aside. He absolved himself, in fact, of anything having to do with such ridiculously well-timed and convenient coincidences, or with the universe's apparently twisted sense of humor. He was simply sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time, a hapless victim of unnatural circumstances.

It _was_ kind of entirely his fault that he ended up going home with the bastard, though.

Jounouchi was still trying to figure out how that had happened.

-

Kaiba froze just outside the door upon spotting Jounouchi, one eye growing slightly smaller than its opposite as they stared one another down. Jounouchi wondered absently if he needed to have that checked out. Even more absently he hoped that it was a sign of something serious, like high blood pressure or food poisoning or some kind of bastard-selecting super virus.

...that was a hilarious thought, actually. Jounouchi had to stop himself before he actually snickered out loud, certain that having to explain the joke would render it immediately worthless.

For a long moment nothing happened. Kaiba stared and Jounouchi tried to keep his mouth shut, ears going gradually red with the effort. People continued to pass them on the street, several shooting Jounouchi strange looks which he caught in his peripheral vision, and several more skirting around Kaiba entirely, walking into the street to avoid him.

A small woman in a green skirt, however, had business in the coffee shop, and walked boldly around the frozen brunet, shooting him a very pointed look as she pushed the door open. A chime hanging from the frame above sounded in response, almost too far away for Jounouchi to hear properly; but Kaiba, as though this had been some sort of cue, twitched visibly, returning to himself at last. His lips began to purse.

For a second Jounouchi thought he was actually going to walk away without saying anything, but another few seconds saw him crossing the street, completely ignoring the crosswalk three feet to his left in favor of taking the direct route, and stopping a few paces away on the curb edge--where he then proceeded to stare asymmetrically at Jounouchi again. Apparently the shock of seeing him so unexpectedly was just too much to handle at two thirty in the morning. Truth be told, it was kind of refreshing to see him at such a loss for words, snotty or otherwise.

Jounouchi noticed the two cups of coffee he was holding at this point. They looked identical, each one white, each with a thin cardboard protector wrapped around the middle, each with a plastic top. Kaiba was even holding them the same way in either hand.

"You gonna drink both of those?" he heard himself ask, indicating the cups as he spoke.

Kaiba's expression held at careful, neutral blankness, with the exception of his slightly manic eyes. "I was planning on it."

"Well, that's fuckin' selfish." Jounouchi held out one expectant hand, two fingers crooked. "Fork one over. No _way_ do you need that much caffeine. You'll start twitching more than you already do, moneybags."

"No names this morning," Kaiba said softly, narrowing his eyes into equality at last. "I've already thought of three jokes. _I've_ simply had the self-discipline to contain myself."

"Whatever," Jounouchi snorted, and began to wiggle his fingers encouragingly.

Kaiba said nothing.

Then, moving against all the laws of probability and logic, he handed over the drink in his left hand, letting Jounouchi get a firm hold of it before lifting his own and taking what the blond guessed was his first sip. Jounouchi spent that time staring blankly at the cup he was suddenly holding. It seemed a little stupid now that he thought about it, but he hadn't actually expected Kaiba to hand the thing over.

"Well?" the brunet said after a moment of this, lifting one eyebrow haughtily. "Are you going to drink that, or were you planning on absorbing it through your eyes? Because I want it back if all you're going to do is stare."

Jounouchi blinked. "I can't believe you gave it to me."

"What a humanitarian I've become," Kaiba waxed flatly. "Your concern for my health was touching. I just had to feed your pitiful addiction in thanks."

Jounouchi blinked again. "Yeah, but why?"

Kaiba's face went blank again, eyes growing a little guarded. Disturbed by Jounouchi's failure to bite at his response, maybe. Made sense; it disturbed Jounouchi too, but only in a distant, comfortable kind of way.

"I don't need the caffeine," Kaiba said finally, slowly, as though it was difficult for him to admit this fact. "You were correct about that." Then he began to glare again. "Count yourself lucky for being in the right place. You're getting a free drink out of it." He paused to take another quick sip, casting his eyes across their surroundings as he did.

Jounouchi took one final look at the coffee, then grinned lopsidedly. What the hell, right? "Well, thanks, moneyb--uh, man. I mean it."

"Mm," Kaiba intoned noncommittally, watching Jounouchi take his first sip. "Save your thanks. I may very well have poisoned it."

Jounouchi nearly sprayed his mouthful of latte (of course the guy drank fucking _lattes_, drip wasn't pretentious enough for douchebags) across the sidewalk. Fighting against that humiliating scenario, he began to cough violently instead, swallowing rapidly. This turned out to be little better than the spit take, seeing as it introduced some of the drink rather painfully to his lungs, but in the end he managed not to die.

"You think that was _funny?_" he demanded at last, coughing into the crook of his arm and wheezing. Only realizing now that there was no way he could have poisoned it, and particularly no reason for him to have done so, didn't make him feel any better, particularly when Kaiba looked so smug about pulling one over on him.

"Well, it was worth destroying the good will," Kaiba answered casually, taking another, far more assured sip of his drink as Jounouchi recovered. "What are you doing hanging around here? This isn't exactly your neighborhood. Or anywhere near it. Strays typically get impounded, you know."

Well, apparently the no-name-calling rule had been lifted. Jounouchi glowered, hunching his shoulders and helping himself to another sip of his drink, sulkily taking as much time as he could to answer.

"I couldn't sleep," he said at last, and glared, for no particular reason other than that Kaiba deserved to be glared at for existing.

"Ah."

"Haven't been able to for a couple days now," he added.

"Of course," Kaiba agreed. "So you decided to take a nine-block promenade. How European."

Jounouchi's glare went nasty before he could stop it, all pretenses abandoned. "I fuckin' hate you."

Watching Kaiba's smirk get wider at this really didn't help to change that.

They lapsed into another silent staring contest at this point. Jounouchi took the opportunity to gather his wits and attempt to think of some really brilliant comeback, which eventually chose, despite his best efforts, not to arrive. After a while he just gave up, lapsing quietly into another fit of sulking instead.

"You got a deck of playing cards at your place?" he asked finally, for lack of anything better.

Kaiba lifted an eyebrow. "Three."

"Cool," Jounouchi said, and came to a decision he hadn't even known he'd been pondering, struggling up to his feet and doing his best to look Kaiba in the eye (which was a challenge when the other teen was nearly half a foot taller than him, but screw that). "I'm going back with you, man."

Kaiba's eye got smaller again. This was immensely satisfying. "Excuse me?"

"Going deaf now, old man?"

"No," Kaiba growled. "I just thought I heard you making an incredibly tasteless joke."

"So that's obviously a yes, then," Jounouchi snickered, and began to walk in the direction Kaiba had first looked like he was going to head after exiting the shop. "All my jokes are awesome."

Kaiba, apparently at a loss as to what else to do, followed after him, a dark look on his face. "You're not putting one foot inside my house."

"Don't you mean your _mansion_, dumbass?" Jounouchi snorted, twisting his head around to get his bearings. If he found the right street he'd be able to make it on his own, but this immediate area was still a little fuzzy to him. "Shit. How's that thing a house? It's gotta have thirty rooms."

"Twenty-eight," Kaiba snapped, "and that's not the _point_, the point is--"

"--that you're a greedy, snotty bastard who's got way more space than he needs. _Fuck_, man, _twenty-eight rooms?_ What're you doing, smuggling immigrants?"

"Running a business," Kaiba said coldly.

"Right. 'Kaiba's Immigration Services', sounds awesome--"

"You know _exactly_ what kind of business it is, you stupid--"

Jounouchi rolled his eyes, cutting the brunet off before he could continue: "Man, Kaiba, I'm _kidding_. A joke. Funny, fufufu. Get it?"

"No," the CEO snapped icily, "and I'd appreciate it if you turned your skinny, poorly-bred ass around and took your terrible sense of humor back to your own trash neighborhood."

_Ow_. "Well, fuck you too," Jounouchi glared, stung despite his long exposure to the guy. Sometimes he was just _low_. "You got something better to do than play me a few rounds?"

"Several somethings," Kaiba seethed quietly. He was dodging obstacles on the sidewalk without seemingly looking, as tall and graceful as ever, though there seemed to be a slightly erratic quality to his movements that Jounouchi was only just beginning to notice. The argument never once paused, though they had yet to actually stop walking, which Jounouchi supposed meant he was doing a pretty good job of multi-tasking too.

He followed this point by sneering eloquently, shoving his free hand into the ratty pocket of his jeans. "Scared you'll lose?"

At first Kaiba tried to brush the jab off, managing to conceal a tiny jerk of irritation by lifting his head arrogantly. "Of course not. You haven't got anything to bring that I can't match. Without even _trying_."

"Except luck," Jounouchi pointed out.

Kaiba stopped walking.

The blond could practically see him bristling around the edges, eyes narrowing to twin slits, expression otherwise inscrutable. The fact that he was now quite pissed, however, was undeniable. Jounouchi wasn't really surprised, of course. He had brought up the one truth Kaiba seemed to most hate having to hear; that Jounouchi was just _lucky_, and he wasn't.

"That's bullshit," Kaiba said at last, voice soft and brimming with controlled venom. "I can beat you at _anything_, lucky or not. Only imbeciles rely on something that fickle."

Oh, Jounouchi _liked_ the way this was going. He smirked challengingly, using only one half of his mouth, and tilted his head back, staring the other teen down. It was a trick he'd learned in the gang, but every once in a while it came in handy outside of it.

"Prove it."

-

When they came to the mansion, coffee cups long discarded in a handy trash can, the first thing Jounouchi noticed was that all the lights in all the many windows were out. He supposed this kind of made sense (it _was_ the middle of the night), but somehow he had always imagined that the place would never be completely dark.

It made it look rather intimidating, as though it had been abandoned years ago and left to fall apart in neglected peace, vandalized off and on by bored teenagers, offering temporary shelter to vagrants. Only the well-tended lawns allowed him to think otherwise, as well as the functioning security gate, and damned if it didn't feel _weird_ to be walking in on foot. Jounouchi couldn't help but wonder why Kaiba hadn't called for his driver. All that bullshit aside, however, what he was really looking forward to was getting indoors fast, where it would be air conditioned and tolerable.

When Kaiba swung the door open and let him step in, however, he was rather disappointed to find that it was even muggier in the gigantic reception hall than on the front steps--which was also weird, because he had remembered it being very cold here in the past.

...actually, the Kaiba mansion didn't _look_ quite like he remembered, either. As in it now looked like someone, or possibly several someones, had ransacked the place.

"Shit, man," he snorted, kicking his sandals off in the genkan and taking a good look around. At the least the stone floor was relatively cool; he wiggled his toes vigorously as soon as they were free, enjoying the sensation. "You moving or something?"

And that was the thing--there were boxes _everywhere_, and if not boxes, then assloads of electrical equipment. Just from this one spot Jounouchi could see a dozen computers, more than fifteen monitors, and about _ten thousand_ feet of cable, not to mention things he didn't recognize in the slightest, from featureless knee-high black boxes with little slots in their sides to what looked suspiciously like a series of robotic arms. A pair of exhausted maids were in the middle of sorting through this particular stretch of technology, though both looked up as soon as Kaiba walked in and dropped tiny, simultaneous bows.

Kaiba nodded back to them, then favored Jounouchi with a flat, distasteful look that was probably supposed to be withering, and probably would have been to anyone else. "No," he replied coolly, toeing his own shoes off and stepping up into the hall proper, his voice echoing faintly. "We're consolidating the network into five rooms."

Well, _that_ meant absolutely nothing. Jounouchi stuck a finger in his right ear and began to dig, frowning in silent expectation, waiting for him to hurry up and finish his sentence.

Kaiba held out for several seconds against this, but finally gave up and shot him a very pointed, very irritated look. "Thanks to this heat wave, cooling the entire house--"

"Mansion," Jounouchi interjected helpfully; Kaiba glared, but otherwise ignored him.

"--happens to black out our section of the local power grid, and our private reserves _mysteriously_ failed yesterday."

Jounouchi supposed from his tone that someone was going to end up fired for this, and possibly a whole lot of people if it turned out that they'd actually cocked things up as badly as he seemed to be suggesting.

"_So_," Kaiba continued sharply, moving down the hall to hook one arm through a large bunch of cables, which he lifted as though it weighed no more than a hat or pair of shoes, "we're trying to cut our normal ten-room spread in half. Everything will therefore be moved into five rooms, which we'll divert the majority of our energy toward cooling. You might have noticed that the lights and air conditioning are off."

Oh, right. Because it wasn't _obvious_ or anything that they were standing around in the dark and pouring sweat like a bunch of public fountains. "Well, if you gotta do this, when are you gonna have time to play?"

"I suppose that remains to be seen, doesn't it?"

And then Kaiba walked off through one of many doors lining the perimeter of the hall, throwing sharply over his shoulder, "Find someplace to sit. And don't touch _anything_, or I'll have all your fingers broken."

Jounouchi flipped him off with both hands, but unfortunately he had already turned away, so the gestures went unappreciated. Realizing now that he had made an incredibly stupid decision back there outside the coffee shop, he considered leaving for all of three seconds, then realized that this was exactly what Kaiba wanted him to do, and went to sulk by the robotic arms instead.

-

Ten minutes passed. The maids remerged twice from wherever it was they were taking the various pieces, Kaiba three times. At first Jounouchi was confused by his involvement, as he'd expected this to be the sort of project the asshole would have woken somebody else up to do, but then he remembered exactly how much of a control freak the guy was, and suddenly couldn't be confused at all.

But Jounouchi was also bored, and particularly fed up with being treated like a piece of inconvenient furniture. He tried whistling first to pass the time, then drumming his heels rhythmically, then mock-wrestling a few of the arms. None of it did very much in the end, however, so when Kaiba emerged a fourth time, Jounouchi put down the most recently defeated fake limb and turned to ask loudly, "Can I move some stuff too?"

Kaiba lifted one eyebrow at him incredulously, lifting an entire computer up under one of his creepily long arms and leaning back down for another bunch of cables. "You actually want to _help?_"

"No," Jounouchi replied, "but I'm bored shitless. It'd get it done faster, right?"

Kaiba looked like he wanted to refuse just on principle, but something stopped him. He hesitated for several seconds, casting his eyes briefly around the dark hall, then abruptly whistled a short, sharp note. Jounouchi jumped, startled, and had just barely managed to recover his composure by the time one of the maids jogged back into the room, making a beeline for Kaiba.

"Kaiba-sama?" she said politely, bobbing another small bow.

"Let this idiot help you," Kaiba instructed without preamble, indicating Jounouchi with a slight jerk of his head. "Show him where to put things. Make sure you make a note of anything he breaks."

The maid bowed again, then turned toward Jounouchi expectantly.

"I'll take this opportunity to remind you," Kaiba said pointedly, watching with her as Jounouchi climbed to his feet, terrified by this bizarre display of hierarchy and trying not to show it, "that one piece of this equipment costs more than the entirety of your current education."

"Guess that makes it fun, doesn't it?" Jounouchi replied through gritted teeth, and followed the maid without another word.

-

It took the better part of an hour, but by ten to four everything had at last been moved that needed to be. Kaiba paused to take an appraising look around the final room in which they had all ultimately converged, then at last nodded fractionally and gave the maids permission to go home, for which they looked amazingly grateful.

"You shouldn't've kept them so long," Jounouchi remarked as soon as they'd left, frowning. "I mean, they're girls."

"They're getting the day off tomorrow," Kaiba replied dismissively, as though this excused everything. "I'll have the regular staff hook everything up after I leave for school, I suppose."

Here he turned finally to stare at Jounouchi with a challenging expectancy. "Still ready to be humiliated?"

"Only if you go first," Jounouchi grinned, sticking sore hands into his pants pockets. "It's your place, after all."

So Kaiba led him back into the reception hall, up the gigantic flight of stairs, down another hall to the right of these, and finally into a room that was easily half the size of Jounouchi's apartment, if not a little bigger. His study, it appeared.

It was a mess, but a terrifyingly organized mess. There were books and papers _everywhere_, but all the piles were neat, and more or less segregated around the floor by type. A large redwood desk dominated the far wall, the surface littered with coffee mugs and post it notes in a rainbow of colors, with two separate laptops humming in two separate locations within the sea of paper. Bookshelves scattered around the walls contained the equivalent of a small library, every shelf full, and probably alphabetized too, because that was just the kind of asshole Kaiba was.

The only other furnishing came from a few surprisingly comfortable-looking chairs, and a gigantic set of bay windows that took up most of the left side of the room, with a hidden door leading to a little balcony. Lamps on the walls were the sole source of light, though currently only a few were on, giving the whole thing a shockingly warm, well-used appearance, completely different from the clinical lines Jounouchi had seen throughout the rest of the house.

Squinting a little harder through the relative gloom, Jounouchi noticed last of all several neat rows of printer paper tacked up on the wall over the desk, one composed entirely of what looked like concept art, one of costume designs, and then several of--what were those, storyboards?

"For the new game?" he heard himself ask distantly, stepping partway into the room to get a better look at them.

"Yes," Kaiba said shortly, and swept past him toward the desk, closing both of the laptops and beginning to collect the sticky notes in neat stacks, back turned the whole time.

Embarrassed and unable to quite figure out why--maybe because this was so obviously Kaiba's personal space, apparently the site of both his schoolwork and the majority of the company work he did at home--Jounouchi frowned and started inspecting the books on the floor instead.

A lot of them were in different languages, but he recognized a few of the more technical works, and even fewer of the classics: the Genji Monogatari, several volumes of history, a white book on clustering, the Man'yōshū, Sōseki's novel Kokoro--which they'd all had to read last year for school, now that he thought about it--and then so many books he didn't even _recognize_, books with English titles and Chinese titles, textbooks on philosophy, psychology, mythology, mathematics, science and astronomy and physics, and even more that he couldn't make out in the half-darkness.

"_Shit_," he said wholeheartedly, awed in spite of himself. "Kaiba, have you read all these?"

"Not yet," Kaiba replied calmly, picking up a thin volume from the desk and tossing it lightly onto one of the piles by his legs.

"Shit," Jounouchi muttered again, crouching down to sift through one particularly tall and impressive stack. "Who even needs to read all of...man, what the _hell_ is Ju...uh...Justu So Storuis?"

"Rudyard Kipling. Here."

Jounouchi looked up just in time to have a deck of cards thrown into his face. He yelped, dropping the book in surprise. The cards (fortunately held together by a rubber band) toppled into his lap.

"Damnit," he swore indignantly when he'd regained his senses, "why can't you just walk over and _hand_ them to me, you prick--"

"You've invited yourself into my house, you drank my coffee--"

"I helped move your fucking computers!"

"--and I'm being so nice as to _not_ toss you out onto your ass in the street. If I want to throw something at you, I think I'm justified."

Jounouchi frowned, picking the cards up and rubbing his nose. "Yeah," he mumbled into his hand, lowering his eyes, "and you can be plenty _justified_ in kissing my ass."

"What was that?"

"Nothing," Jounouchi answered, slipping the deck out of the rubber band with unsteady hands and clumsily beginning to shuffle the cards. His fingers weren't cooperating very well; somewhere between the insomnia and the manual labor and the coffee he had started to tremble just a little, and it wasn't getting any better.

Kaiba noticed. After a moment without any real progress Jounouchi heard him sigh, followed a few seconds later by a handful of long, elegant fingers (_kinda womanly, really_) entering his field of vision and plucking the cards away from him. Jounouchi let his eyes follow them unthinkingly, his focus honing in on Kaiba's hands as the young man tapped the cards into order, bridged them, then began to shuffle them very calmly and well. In midair.

Life just wasn't fair.

Sighing, Jounouchi scooted between the piles of books to the nearest sturdy object against which he could lean, which turned out to be the leg of the desk, and laced his fingers over his stomach, letting his eyes wander around the room. The sky outside the single tall window was just starting to lighten and grey; he supposed it had to be about four by now. He'd been at Kaiba's house for a little over an hour.

"Gin or poker?"

"Huh?" he said intelligently, snapping his head away from the window and wishing almost instantly that he hadn't; the rapid movement made his eyes cross, the warmly lit interior of the study swimming around him for several seconds before settling back into place.

Kaiba was frowning, standing over him and holding the deck loosely in one hand, the edges neatly lined up. "What game do you want to play? This was your idea, remember?"

"Yeah, yeah, I remember," Jounouchi snorted, forcing his body into a less crumpled sitting position. What had he said? Gin and what? Whatever, he already knew which game he was interested in. "I wanna play war."

Kaiba's face pinched slightly in distaste, his eyes narrowing. "You're not serious."

"What's wrong with war?"

"Apart from it taking hours to finish?"

"It doesn't take _hours_," Jounouchi protested, trying to forget the games he'd played that actually had. It was only a small lie, right? And he really wanted to see how good Kaiba was at this. Let the guy give it a few hours. At this rate they were both probably going to end up leaving for school at the same time anyway, and if he kept the brunet busy for long enough he might even be able to bum a free ride off him.

Maybe it was the insomnia affecting him badly at last (or maybe he was just as transparent as people had always claimed he was), but Kaiba seemed to literally be picking every one of these thoughts right off his face. His expression read like he was, folding up slowly in a clear warning. "I'll play. But only for an hour. After that you're going home. On _foot_."

Bastard. "Fine," Jounouchi muttered, crossing his legs sullenly and sitting forward. Kaiba sat down in front of him, setting the deck neatly between them. "Cheapskate."

"Just cut the cards, mutt."

-

"You've got to be cheating."

"Hey, you're the one who's shuffling, asshole," Jounouchi snickered, taking more satisfaction than was strictly appropriate out of watching Kaiba's hands getting tighter and tighter around his dwindling portion of the deck.

The games hadn't been taking hours, contrary to Kaiba's snotty opinion. In fact, they had played two full matches already, both of which Jounouchi had won, and were nearing the end of their third with five minutes still left in his prescribed hour. Kaiba had yet to make any real headway against him.

Who said relying on luck didn't work every now and again?

"This is _ridiculous_," Kaiba muttered, eyes on the cards sitting in front of him, refusing to meet Jounouchi's smirking gaze. Honestly, the blond had half expected him to throw down already, though he knew somewhere in the back of his head that Kaiba would never be that obviously petty. He'd find a more intellectual way to get back at him, and though the retaliation would come with the same childish intention, the method by which it was carried out would effectively prove that he was, and always would be, a hell of a lot smarter. Maybe not as savvy, but bigger-brained for sure. Which was fine, so long as Jounouchi kept winning.

"Don't _whine_, man," he told the older teen, prodding him with one foot and getting his ankle slapped for his trouble. The sun was just beginning to rise, and the wood panels of the floor in front of him were literally on fire with color, a rich red-black that made him think of American comic books and their way overdone inks, or blood, or alcohol. A little browner than good wine, but plenty rich enough--and on top of that the light was reflecting gold, meaning it was probably going to be another scorcher--

"Hey, _idiot_."

Fuck. Jounouchi jerked his head up from the floor, staring at the almost-two Kaibas (he was just blurring, right? There weren't really _two_ of them, right? Well, duh there were two Kaibas, Mokuba was probably sleeping just down the hall, but the kid was _not_ a clone like this) for several dragging seconds with his mouth open. "Uh. Yeah, what?"

Kaiba shot him an odd, quiet look. Then his lips pursed all over again. Jounouchi wondered how exactly he did that without looking like a total girl. "It's your move."

Jounouchi looked down at the cards. So it was.

"...no, I'm shot."

Kaiba quirked an eyebrow at him, but remained otherwise immobile. Jounouchi wondered how he did that, too. "Sorry?"

"No you're not," Jounouchi laughed, slapped the floor at his own pun, then quickly moved on, before Kaiba's glare could actually light him on fire: "No, I mean, I'm finished. No more cards. Let's say you win this one, asshole. If I gotta walk home, I gotta walk now, or I'll miss first period."

"You miss it all the time," Kaiba said, just a little incredulous; then his eyes widened more. "You're not running out now, mutt. Finish the game."

"Dude." Crap, Jounouchi could actually _see_ his hands taking a death grip on the cards. "It's not a big deal. I've only got--what, four minutes left? I'm not gonna win. And neither are you, actually. So let's just call it a tie and let it go."

"No," said Kaiba, staring at him intently. The hair all along Jounouchi's arms stood abruptly on end. _Great, genius, you got him in one of his crazy moods_. "Finish the game."

Fuck that. Irritated, Jounouchi shot one hand out and grabbed Kaiba's section of the deck, grateful not only for the way his depth perception came through, but for the lamination of the cards as well; they slid right out of the older teen's sweaty grip like they'd been buttered. "Calm down, man. It's over."

For a second Jounouchi actually thought the brunet was going to wrestle him for them, and braced himself for impact. After a few seconds, however, Kaiba more or less got a hold of himself (frightening expression notwithstanding), sitting back in a tight, controlled motion.

"Alright," he said stiffly, then abruptly got up and walked around Jounouchi to the desk. Drawers opened and closed with sharp snaps, Kaiba taking papers out, putting papers in, retrieving various pieces of electrical equipment. "Put that book back where you got it from."

"Huh?" Jounouchi managed to get up with an only slightly geriatric hunch, sliding the deck into his back pocket as he moved. He'd drop it off on the desk once he headed for the door; before that had been done, he didn't quite trust Kaiba to leave it alone.

"That book you touched earlier. Put it back."

Man, the guy wasn't even _looking_ at him. Pissed off all over again, Jounouchi peered around the stacks in frustration, trying to figure out what the fuck he was talking about. What book? "You're a real piece a work, Kaiba. What--fuck, that one?"

The green one he'd read the title of--the one he'd dropped when Kaiba had thrown the deck at him. Kaiba turned around, followed the direction of his pointing finger, then nodded tightly. "Put it back."

_Seriously?_ "...on which pile?"

Kaiba rolled his eyes. "The third in the semi-circle. With the Torah on top, idiot."

Picking up the book, Jounouchi stared around some more, at a complete loss by this point. What the _fuck_ was a Torah? "And that looks like...?"

"_Unbelievable_." And then the asshole did that weird vampiric sudden-appearance thing again, sweeping silently across the floor and grabbing the book out of Jounouchi's hand, expression a picture of frustration. "Go. Get out, I'll take care of it. You're a minute past your time anyway."

Jounouchi mimicked Kaiba's eye-roll elaborately, flipping him off as an afterthought on his way to the door. "Yeah, fuck you too. Nice games and manual labor and all. Great way to waste a few precious hours of my life."

"Get out, Jounouchi," Kaiba said softly. It was addressed to the floor, as he was crouching now to find the right stack, but Jounouchi heard him loud and clear, the words oddly heavy in the pre-dawn warmth.

"'Course, moneybags," he sneered, and was halfway through preparing to slam the door before he remembered Mokuba-who-was-possibly-down-the-hall; "Wouldn't wanna be late for school."

It would have been nice to punctuate that with a bang, but he had to settle for a forceful click instead. It wasn't too horribly pathetic, and at least Kaiba was just an asshole, not telepathic or telekinetic or whatever the hell it was that would have allowed him to get the last word through the door.

Small blessings.

-

The walk back to his apartment was a lot worse in many ways, most of all the significantly increased number of pedestrians giving him weird sideways glances on every street. He somehow doubted he looked that bad (people tended to stare at him even on good days, after all), but it still set his teeth on edge, those eyes following endlessly in his wake.

He wondered as he walked if it was possible to have a particular span of time surgically removed from one's memory. There had to be somebody out there working on the technology, right?

...then again, knowing the way shitty coincidences liked to make regular appearances in his life, that would turn out to be Kaiba Corporations. And then he'd _really_ be fucked left, right, and center.

The apartment was already sweltering by the time he got back, the full-east windows in the kitchen unit and his bedroom letting in the perfect amount of sunlight to bake them alive. Or just him; his father _still_ wasn't home. But from the look of things, at least nobody else had dropped by.

Sighing, Jounouchi tromped tiredly into his room, yanked his tank top over his head, dropped it on the floor, then braced his hands against his closet and took a moment to breathe, breathe, breathe in and out, and concentrate on releasing as much heat as was humanly possible directly through his armpits. This technique didn't work quite as well as he'd hoped, and after a moment he gave up, reaching for his wallet instead and trying to remember where he'd left his school bag and uniform last. After that he could open the fridge and stand in front of it, at least for a few minutes.

Then he realized there was something in his other back pocket.

Kaiba's deck of cards.

"Oh, _fuck_." Glaring, Jounouchi yanked it out. Then he stared balefully for a long, long moment, eyes burning.

Why was this crap always happening to him, anyway? "I don't wanna walk these all the way _back_, damnit."

So much for luck.

_end two_

**end notes**  
- 'Fufufu' = villainous laughter. See also 'kukuku' or 'kekeke' (all favorites of Naraku).

- On the grid blackouts: it is possible for this happen (living in a Californian suburb as a kid, during the summer we used to have our daily 5 o'clock power outages, as this was when pretty much everybody got home from work and turned on their air conditioners _at the same time_), though possibly unlikely in a large city; I couldn't say, having never lived in one before. The sheer improbability of it, however, is part of the point.

- Genji Monogatari = The Tale of Genji. The Man'yōshū = really old collection of Japanese poetry. Natsume Sōseki's "Kokoro" = one of the first pieces of modern Japanese lit (1915). Just So Stories = collection of African short stories put together by Rudyard Kipling (who was not African). The Torah = the first five books of the Old Testament, or, more appropriately, the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), central to Jewish religious scholarship and practice as the first of three sections in the Jewish bible (Tanakh).


	3. Treasure Vase

**Start Three  
_Treasure Vase_**

Two hours later Jounouchi collapsed into his desk at school, wrinkled uniform more or less in order, took one deep breath, and decided the first the thing he was going to complain about was the heat.

According to Yuugi (who looked very comfortable, and subsequently could not possibly have sweat glands--that or the spirit of the puzzle was just keeping him magically cold, which wasn't _fair_), the air conditioning had given out earlier that morning, and all the windows--even those on the ground floor--had been thrown wide, allowing a quiet, unbearably warm breeze to slip in and whisper through the hallways and classrooms. By mid-morning it had become almost painfully obvious how little everybody wanted to be there, the typically loud student body speaking largely in subdued, exhausted tones, and even in some cases taking the calculated risk of napping at their desks.

This was the second thing he complained about, though internally this time instead of out loud; that he was apparently _the only person in the world_ who _couldn't_ sleep through this thing, even though he now felt as though his head was splitting from exhaustion. Focusing on anything for extended periods of time was becoming the biggest pain in the ass he could imagine.

The third thing he tried to complain about, but could only notice in a rather shocked daze--that _most_ of the school noticed--was that Kaiba was late.

Jounouchi was pretty sure this meant that the very fabric of space-time was beginning to fray irreparably, because Kaiba Seto was never late. Kaiba Seto was a god of punctuality. Kaiba Seto gave _other_ people shit for being late. He simply could not be.

And yet that morning, completely out of sync with the obvious laws of physics, the universe, and everything else that was supposed to be constant, Kaiba was not at his desk when first period began, and was still not at his desk fifteen minutes later. He was at his desk half an hour later.

All things considered, his entrance was undeniably graceful. It took a while for Jounouchi in his current state of mind to piece it all together, but he remembered distinctly looking up as the door opened abruptly, revealing Kaiba, tall, impeccably put together, glaring in at all of them. He remembered no one speaking. He remembered his mouth falling open a little.

He remembered Kaiba stalking in, shooting him one sharp glance, then sitting at his desk as though nothing was out of the ordinary.

After that, Jounouchi only remembered wondering why Kaiba didn't look like as much hell as he felt.

-

The lecture went through and right out of Jounouchi's brain so easily that he hardly even realized he was missing it, spending his time staring glassily out the window instead. He thought of anything and everything to float abstractly across the planes of his mind, from computer games to card decks to how he was going to beg for lunch to Kaiba and back around again.

So, in order of importance...the computer game was the new one, Ammit, the card deck was that damn one of Kaiba's (which he still had no idea how to go about returning), the lunch was probably going to be a combination of Yuugi's and Honda's, since he had forgotten his own, and Kaiba...was just Kaiba. And a problem, like always.

Just a different kind of problem. Before last night he had been a bastard problem and nothing more, ignorable and easily relegated to irreparable asshole status.

But last night Jounouchi had finally done--on accident, but he'd done it all the same--the one thing he had only just been telling himself he didn't want to do, which was see into Kaiba's head, and in so doing reinforce the stray scrap of knowledge which had been drifting around his own head for so many years: that Kaiba actually _was_ a human being, for all he pretended he didn't breathe oxygen like the rest of them, and more importantly that he was a kind of sad human being at that. Sure, he was rich as fuck, but what did he get to spend his nights doing? Buying fancy Western coffee and moving computers around in the small hours of the morning, reading until his eyes bled, like he was going to learn anything about anything doing that.

All in all, Jounouchi was conflicted. On the one hand, it was kind of nice to watch the guy stewing in his own juices. On the other, there was a reason Honda had been able to convince him to leave the gang in the end; for all he'd been obsessed with toughness throughout his life, he had for just as long had an inconvenient soft spot for helping people out of bad situations. A gangster who ended up feeling sorry for the people his gang took advantage of was bound to fail at it eventually.

Strictly speaking, what he really hated was watching people give up on things, particularly themselves. For example: his life wasn't exactly a bed of roses, but the one thing he had managed to never lose, through all the shit that went down with his parents and his income and staying in school and not making an ass out of himself 24/7, was the belief that things would brighten up eventually. They always did. And he _liked_ knowing that he got to wake up on those better mornings as him, Jounouchi Katsuya, the former thug with the golden fingertips. Put simply, his life sucked; but not as bad as it once had, all because he hadn't ever given up believing that someday it wouldn't. Not as much, at least.

Kaiba, on the other hand, was proving to be human, but no kind of person. The more Jounouchi thought about it, the more he found himself wondering--who _was_ Kaiba? It was part of what freaked Jounouchi out so much about him; that all he saw anymore when he looked at Kaiba were neuroses, obsessions and frustrations and that horrible, overwhelming disdain.

He was giving up on himself. Jounouchi wasn't quite sure how, but it made him sick to his stomach all the same, having to watch another guy his own age go so far downhill so fast. It was kind of like puberty all over again, seeing the first friends he'd made in Domino become gangsters like himself, or alcoholics like their own fathers, or womanizers, or thieves. He couldn't think of very many he'd still talk to, given the choice.

Maybe it was just the insomnia putting this crap in his head, or maybe it was just the insomnia solidifying crap that had already been up there. Jounouchi wasn't really sure. All he knew was he'd gotten a chance to inspect something, and having taken it, he was now going to get to carry the results around for the rest of his life, and possibly never have any idea what to do with them.

Or maybe the insomnia was just making him think stupidly complex, falsely deep-sounding things as a matter of course, and none of it actually meant anything at all.

-

The morning dwindled into afternoon, and Honda started to give him slightly weird looks about an hour before lunch, while _everybody_ tried not to give Kaiba looks for any reason. This, however, was hard, because while he appeared utterly composed, he also wasn't following his usual routine of bouncing back and forth between ignoring the world and abruptly jumping into Jounouchi or Yuugi's conversations (because obviously he'd been eavesdropping the whole time, or maybe had the classroom bugged--Jounouchi had never been able to decide which). Today he was instead in exclusive silent mode, just like his laptops, and only looked up from his books and neatly transcribed notes when their teacher called on him.

That, and when Jounouchi took a peek over his shoulder on one particular trip to the restroom, it was hard not to notice that the notes weren't quite as neat as usual (Jounouchi knew because he'd had a bunch thrown in his face once, and he remembered those scary, mechanical katakana drifting before his eyes in their scary, mechanical rows), and there were even doodles in some of the margins. These were tiny schematics and a few object designs instead of the usual flowers or endlessly flowering spirals, but Kaiba had never been what Jounouchi would call normal.

Anyway. The point was that something was wrong with Kaiba.

"Jounouchi, did you eat anything this morning?"

"Huh?" Jounouchi said, jerking in his seat to stare at Honda.

Honda, who was now nodding sagely at Yuugi and holding his chin with the thumb and forefinger of one hand. "Yeah, I think that explains everything. Come on, dude, it's lunch time. You didn't bring anything, right?"

Jounouchi shook his head, trying to remember when class had ended, and more importantly when Kaiba had left the room. Hadn't he just been there?

"That's alright, Jou-kun," Yuugi said cheerfully, "you can share ours."

And this was how Jounouchi got to eat that afternoon without having to beg at all.

-

Kaiba swept back into the classroom from wherever it was he'd gone to eat his lunch ten minutes after Jounouchi. The blond had long suspected that this was the limo, but was prepared to learn otherwise (for example; that the school reserved an area of special bastard seating in the basement to spare the more or less normal students from having to socialize with him).

Watching him sit in his depressingly close seat (and fuck J coming right before K, anyway--why did they even use the Western alphabet for seating?), Jounouchi waited, waited, waited for the perfect second, took aim, then slammed one heel into the closest leg of Seto's chair. The bastard jerked forward hilariously, one raised fist (what was he holding, a pencil?) thudding against his desk.

Yeah, that was definitely a pencil. A pencil with no tip now.

Kaiba turned and shot him a long, slow, smoldering glare. Then, moving with all the graceful dignity of a bald cat, he stood, and without a word went to hit up the pencil sharpener in the hall. This at last confirmed the suspicion which had been forming in Jounouchi's mind regarding his school supplies--namely, that Kaiba had forgotten his regular pencil case. Typically he used a mechanical pencil (a very sharp mechanical pencil), technology freak that he was, and definitely had his own sharpener (for the normal pencils he carried for show, of course). Yet another bizarre display of forgetfulness on the CEO's part.

As far as Jounouchi could later recall seeing out of the corner of his eye, busy grinning at his desk as he was, it was Jumpei Kanda who ran into Kaiba first, but nobody actually saw it straight on. Rather, it was Jumpei's indignant, offended grunt that actually got everybody looking around in anticipation of a fight.

Kaiba shot him the same flat, cold stare he'd used on Jounouchi, then tried to pass him quietly: the silent asshole treatment.

Having been on the receiving end of this several times, Jounouchi had long ago decided that he was actually more irritating silent than he was speaking, being frighteningly talented at using silence to effectively humiliate those around him. But in this situation he was kind of torn; Kaiba was being a dick by saying nothing, but Jumpei was a snotbag, and one of Jounouchi's other least favorite people in school. Kaiba would always top that list, but this little worm came pretty close.

Put simply, Jumpei was the kind of guy Jounouchi had really liked beating up four years ago. He was a dumbass, but just articulate enough to think he was actually smart, which was irritating in a way completely separate from Kaiba, who really was, and as such didn't need to prove it every time he opened his mouth.

True to form, Jumpei did probably the stupidest thing he could have in that situation (the thing Jounouchi might have done, now that he thought about it) and yanked Kaiba's pencil out of his hand, physically blocking him from the door.

"_Hey_," he said, standing at his full height. They were about even, though the CEO probably had the better part of an inch on him. "Kaiba-_san_, you don't just walk by someone you run into without apologizing."

It wasn't surprising behavior, especially in light of how the class at large treated Kaiba, even on the good days. For the most part all the girls liked him, of course, but were generally too nervous to speak with him openly.

The boys hated his guts.

This was mainly because Kaiba in every single case had done to them almost exactly what he had done to Jounouchi three years earlier: snubbed all their offers of friendship and effectively crushed everything about them into the dust of humiliation and teenage insecurity. Needless to say, the resulting hard feelings hadn't exactly dissipated with time, particularly when girlfriends kept dumping inferior-by-comparison boyfriends to pursue painfully hopeless crushes on the reticent brunet.

On some level Jounouchi figured that Kaiba had to recognize this, though whether he did or not, he apparently didn't care about it enough to bother changing his behavior. Mostly all he did was glare, like he was doing right now, and maintain as shitty an attitude as possible when anybody approached him.

...like he was doing right now. "You ran into me."

"Bullshit!" Jumpei barked. If the room hadn't been quiet before this point, it went there now with a vengeance.

"Move," Kaiba said softly.

"Kiss my ass," Jumpei growled.

And then Kaiba socked him in the nose.

Jounouchi had been following pretty well up to this point, the situation having been all but a carbon copy of the vast majority of his casual encounters with the guy. This, however, was a new development. Jounouchi had never seen Kaiba actually _hit_ anybody before, no matter how angry he'd been.

It was kind of a beautiful thing in isolation; even acting weird, Kaiba had the sense to smack him with the heel of his hand, quick and sharp, instead of wasting time splitting his knuckles, a trick Jounouchi had needed months to work out on his own.

The look on Jumpei's face was also hysterical. He actually tipped over onto his ass, he was so surprised, and then just sat there dribbling blood down the front of his uniform and staring like a little kid.

Kaiba, meanwhile, leaned down to retrieve the pencil he had dropped, then straightened to stare coldly down at him.

"And please return my property, too," he murmured.

Then he walked out into the hall, shutting the door quietly after himself.

-

The news was in every classroom by the very next break: for the first time in the history of his enrollment at Domino High, Kaiba Seto had been called in by the principal.

Even Jounouchi was surprised. It wasn't like this was the first time Kaiba had done something that should have resulted in a good hand-slapping--it had just never actually happened. He was precious to the faculty, who had been touting his enrollment for years as a statement of the quality of their institution's curriculum.

But then, Kaiba had never actually been violent before, and in Jounouchi's experience, violence was the one thing that you could never really get away with in a school setting. Not when you punched the guy in front of half your class, at least.

On top of everything else that had already happened with Kaiba today, this final development at last forced Jounouchi to come to two very firm conclusions:

First, that this was probably the most exciting Monday of his whole life.

Second, that it was entirely possible that he was at this very second watching something happen that he had never thought he would get to see; that being the implacable, unflappable, immovable, unshakeable mountain known colloquially as Kaiba have, maybe for the first time in his eighteen years of existence on this plane of reality, a long-overdue meltdown.

And if this was in fact the case, Jounouchi wanted to be there for _every second of it_.

-

Losing Honda and Yuugi as soon as school ended, Jounouchi managed to track Kaiba down on the sidewalk just outside the front gates. Approaching him quietly from behind, the blond waited until he was without question in earshot, then began casually with the line he'd been working on for the past four hours: "That was almost cool, you know. Kind of Jet Li."

So it wasn't very original. He was tired, damnit.

Kaiba paused, turning to stare at him over one shoulder, then began to walk again once Jounouchi had more or less caught up. "You would think so, wouldn't you?" he muttered, switching his school bag to his other hand and not looking at Jounouchi.

Jounouchi in turn grinned, shrugging and hopping up to walk along the low granite wall of a long, decorative flower planter which contained at this second a very impressive collection of dead twigs and desiccated petals. "Hey, if there's one thing I can appreciate, it's a good punch. Would've been better if he'd punched back, but you can't have everything."

"He wouldn't dare," Kaiba replied, soft and surprisingly tired.

"You get detention?"

"No," Kaiba replied. "Just a lecture. But they've never had any teeth in my case."

Kaiba fell silent, and Jounouchi, figuring that this was probably as good an opportunity as he was ever going to get to bring up the deck, said as casually as possible, "I still got your cards."

Then he eyeballed the older teen. Not too obviously, of course, but enough to let him know that he was paying attention.

Kaiba wasn't. It took him a second to even lift his head, let alone frown at the blond. "What?"

Jounouchi frowned back, turning to look at him a little more obviously. "Your cards, man. The deck we were playing with? I took it home on accident."

Kaiba's expression became instantly focused, the frown spreading. "Yes, I noticed."

Jounouchi raised his hands defensively, not liking the CEO's expression. Like he'd done it on purpose or something. "Look, I said it was an accident, okay? I'll give them back. Not like I want your fucking pansy cards anyway."

"Give them back, then."

It was only at this point that Jounouchi realized the damn things were still sitting on the floor beside his futon. Fuckall. "Uh."

"You forgot them?"

Jounouchi sighed, shoulders falling as he dredged up what edges he could manage of a sheepish grin. "Yeah. Guess I'll have to bring them tomorrow instead. You gonna be on time, man?"

He expected Kaiba to say something immediate and sharp, like _of course_ or _none of your miserable business_. Instead he got one small calculating look and a miniscule shrug. "I can't really say. Bring them by this evening instead."

Jounouchi almost stopped walking, tipping unsteadily off the end of the wall and only catching himself mid-stumble. It was still unbearably hot, the pressing warmth of the red mid-afternoon light shoving atmospheric thumbs into his temples relentlessly. "You mean--wait, take them to your house?"

"That would be the idea." A light smirk. "And don't you mean my _mansion?_"

Confused, Jounouchi tipped his head to one side, shoving his free hand absently into his jacket pocket, where he discovered a small handful of yen that he had happily forgotten about. The fact that Kaiba had just made a joke was beyond processing right now. "I thought you didn't want me anywhere near your place, moneybags." He couldn't quite keep the suspicion out of his voice.

Kaiba simply shot him a withering look, his own hands trailing neatly by his sides. "I'd rather you weren't there," he admitted curtly, "but I want those cards. And I still have to beat you at war."

Oh, well. That explained everything.

-

Six o'clock neared. Jounouchi had spent his afternoon doing, all thing considered, surprisingly little. He'd almost fallen asleep toward the end--he was _certain_ he'd been about to--but then the hooker next door made too much cold soba and came to invite him over around five thirty, which took care of dinner nicely, but nevertheless made him wonder if he was even meant to sleep ever again.

By way of payment he stuffed some toilet paper in his ears and prowled around the corners of her apartment while she cooked, finding the cicadas that had gotten in throughout the day and tossing them back out the broken window they'd first climbed through.

"You should really tape this up, y'know," he called, tossing another one outside and shaking his hand to dissipate the tingle from its buzzing. These were higurashi, and every one just getting started for the evening--plus the little fuckers got a lot louder once you grabbed them. Like every kid, he'd enjoyed collecting their larvae when he was little (or maybe it was just a guy thing), but when it came to crap like this, he found a lot of that boyhood fascination disappearing real fast.

"I know," the hooker--she called herself Kogata, but Jounouchi seriously doubted that was her real name--replied, and there was a giggle underlying the words, just a little nervous. She hated cicadas. Jounouchi had been doing this for her for years, in fact, as had most everybody else on their floor when he wasn't home; as the one bug hater in the building, it was naturally her apartment that became the bug magnet. "I'll ask Daichi-san for some tape later."

She always said that, too. Shaking his head, Jounouchi rolled his eyes, found what he hoped was the last one, and chucked it in the direction of one of the scraggly trees lining the street below. That finished, he made his way into the kitchen, dusting his hands off and dropping the impromptu ear plugs into the trash. "Need any help?"

"Uhm," she said, red mouth pursed with concentration. She was chopping a few wilted green onions vigorously at the counter, the soba already washed and set out on a plate beside her. "The sesame seeds in the pan. Are they burnt yet?"

"What, you wanna burn them?" Jounouchi laughed, wandering over to peer down into the pan as she giggled again. They looked fine, and smelled even better. "They're brown, I guess."

"Okay!" she said brightly, sweeping the onion off the cutting board and into a chipped dish. "Just get the tsuyu and the ginger out of the fridge and we're set! Oh, and wash your hands."

"Roger that." Clicking the burner off, Jounouchi rinsed his hands vigorously under the tap for a moment, wiped them dry on his pants, then retrieved the condiments. She couldn't afford more than these three, but Jounouchi didn't mind. It was nice just to eat. "How's business, by the way?"

"Banging!" she chirped. "Want to carry the soba?"

-

"Oh, Jou-kun," she said a few moments later over the sound of clinking dishes, speaking as they arranged everything on the table. Jounouchi raised his eyebrows at her, dropping a stack of bills on the floor and crossing his legs. "Todaiji-kun came back to Hoshi last night."

That would be the place she worked at. "Oh yeah?" Jounouchi replied mildly, pressing his hands briefly together. "Itadakimasu."

"Itadakimasu," she echoed, dipping her head in brief reverence. "Yeah, and he said Hirutani-san was going to make some rounds soon. Saturday night, I think."

Jounouchi almost dropped his teacup in the middle of filling it, staring at her in surprise. It had only been two weeks since the last big job. "What, seriously?"

"Yeah," she pouted, lifting a bundle of soba delicately onto her plate. "For Obon. Said it was supposed to be seasonal."

"Fuck." Jounouchi returned his attention to the cup reluctantly, biting his lip. It just figured that prick would pick the time Jounouchi was at his worst to get a fresh bug in his pants. "What an asshole."

She wrinkled her nose cutely. "I know. I hate to go out when I know they're wandering around. Makes me want to run everywhere, you know?"

"Better than anyone, Ko-chan," he murmured, and tried hard not to think too much about it. "Thanks for the tip. Hand me the ginger, would ya?"

-

Twenty minutes saw Jounouchi back on the street, relatively well fed and whistling avidly in an attempt to ignore the trembling exhaustion which was eating at him. The higurashi were in full swing now, _u ke ke ke ke ke_ filling the air and beating at his eardrums as the sun began to sink. In his present state the sound was almost worse than car horns, but not quite. At least it faded a little once he got closer to Kaiba's place, where the CEO apparently didn't believe in the whole concept of trees. Probably had special oxygen pumped in fresh.

Asshole.

The cards were tucked firmly in his back pocket, bound up with a few stray threads from the bottom edge of his comforter. He put his hand back to check regularly, convinced they were going to disappear if he turned his attention away for too long, but by the time he got waved through the security gate and began hammering on the mansion's front door, they were still there, still bound.

The door was hot to the touch, despite the lateness of the hour--getting on to eight, actually, and the sun was nearly gone, the fancy wood and mortar of the building's face shining red and tangerine, almost blindingly bright. Within ten minutes the effect would vanish, but true to his occasionally drunk luck, he had managed to arrive just in time to have his eyes burned out.

Mokuba answered the door after the third bang, looking up at him in a considerably nonplussed fashion; certainly more of a snotty look than he had any right to conjure up when he was still so much shorter than the blond. "What do you want?"

"Hello to you too," Jounouchi snarked, squeezing in past him without waiting to be invited. "You better ask your brother about that. I'm just returning something."

"Stealing from businessmen now?" the kid quipped, shutting the door and folding his arms, watching as Jounouchi kicked his shoes off. "How old do you have to be to go to jail proper?"

Shit, they were like _clones_ sometimes. "Twenty," Jounouchi replied, and waggled his eyebrows sarcastically, heading for the stairs. "Guess I've still got some time, eh?"

He half expected another sharp response, but instead Mokuba just looked after him with those freaky, gigantic black eyes, and abruptly said, "He's in his study."

Oh. Jounouchi had kind of figured that was the case, but then...what was the final room count again, twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? He could've been anywhere. Fuck. "Good to know. Take it easy, kid."

Mokuba didn't respond. He just stood, watching silently, until he fell out of sight.

Okay, case in fucking point: the Kaibas were all _freaks_. No bones about it.

-

Kaiba was sitting at his desk, back to the door and head lowered. Jounouchi didn't bother knocking, going for the direct method instead.

But Kaiba didn't look up, even when Jounouchi slammed the door half-heartedly and waited for a few seconds.

It was like going back in time or something, Jounouchi reflected, or perhaps just like watching time freeze. His own room caught the sun right as it was rising, while this one went the opposite way, pointed full west, with its middlemost window framing every second of its descent. Nothing had moved throughout the day, not a book, not a scrap of paper; even Kaiba's clothes were just differently colored variations of the same ones he'd worn last night, or the same ones period--black slacks, blue button down, grey socks.

"You're earlier than I expected," Kaiba said.

Skin prickling in alarm, Jounouchi jerked his head back to glare at him--and found that he was still staring at the desk, intent on whatever the hell he was doing. "Yeah? Sorry to disappoint."

"No you're not," Kaiba replied. It took Jounouchi a few seconds to realize that he was parroting back his own words from the evening before, right down to the last inflection. "Are we going to have to provide the dog with a bone tonight before he'll return what he took?"

Jounouchi blushed reflexively, offended on a whole kaleidoscope of levels by that particular sentiment; that he needed help to feed himself, that he needed to be bribed to do something he'd already offered to fix for free. "Fuck you. Kogata-chan next door had some stuff to share. No need to worry about wasting your fancy crap on me."

"_Kogata?_" Even with his back turned, the sneer in his voice was palpable.

Jounouchi's blush deepened, crawling slowly down from his cheeks. "Look, would you _please_ tell me where I can put your shit so I can get the fuck out of here?"

"You're not putting it anywhere yet," Kaiba replied calmly, and finally turned around in his chair to look at him. "You're going to shuffle, and once you're done shuffling you're going to cut the cards and prepare to have you pride handed to you."

"You know, you never even asked if I was gonna do this," Jounouchi pointed out, but removed the cards from his pocket anyway, tearing the string off and dropping it on the floor. Let Kaiba clean it up.

Kaiba continued to stare. For the first time Jounouchi noticed that his eyes were very faintly red-rimmed, an odd compliment to the ever-present shadows. "But you're going to play."

He was right, but Jounouchi still didn't like it. And he didn't like that expression, either. "Kaiba?" he found himself venturing uneasily; "How long's it been since you slept?"

"Three days," Kaiba said promptly, and rose out of his chair, gesturing toward the leg of the desk Jounouchi had leaned against before. "Sit down."

"Three _days?_" Jounouchi demanded, shocked, and didn't move. That was almost how long _he'd_ been up. "I thought you said your computer stuff got fucked up Sunday?"

"It did," Kaiba said patiently. "_Sit_."

Jounouchi figured this would be a good time to comply, given that he needed to work a few things out. "So hang on," he prompted slowly, sinking into a cross-legged pose and watching as Kaiba settled across from him. "You've been up that long just for shits and giggles?"

"I've been up this long," Kaiba said precisely, "because I'm in the middle of preparing for our exams next week, because I have a company to run, and because only two weeks from now that company will be entering final production on its most recent game."

Jounouchi stared at him silently. Kaiba shifted, abruptly looking uncomfortable.

Jounouchi continued to stare.

"...and because I haven't been able to sleep," Kaiba added at last, scowling. "Why is this so fascinating?"

"'Cause we're having insomnia at the _same time_," Jounouchi replied intensely, setting the cards between them at last and wondering how this could _not_ seem as important to Kaiba as it did to him. "Don't you think that's _weird?_"

Kaiba, apparently fed up with waiting for him to do it, leaned forward and cut the cards, mouth pursed. "Not particularly. It's probably just the weather."

"You think we can't sleep 'cause it's too _hot?_"

Kaiba lifted one eyebrow at him. "Extreme temperatures interfere with natural bodily cycles. It's a scientific fact."

Really? Perplexed, Jounouchi scratched his neck, which was itchy from all the sweating he'd been doing recently. "I dunno, man. It's never bothered me before."

"Lucky you," Kaiba replied acidly. "Were you ever going to move, or did your brain lose its ability to deliver electrical impulses on top of everything else?"

_end three_

**end notes**  
- Another school note: I have Domino high running an 8AM-3PM schedule, though I think most high schools in Japan actually run 8:30AM-3PM? (Anybody out there know for certain?)

- 'Kogata', as far as my kana/kanji dictionary seems to be telling me, means 'small in size' or 'tiny', which in Kogata's line of work functions more as an advertisement than a name. Furthermore, when connected to her place of work as 'Hoshi Kogata' her name becomes in essence 'little star' (though it probably doesn't conjugate right, re: me constructing this thing from a dictionary. Oh god, I will be so sorry if the joke is lame and makes no sense, you can't even imagine).

- Higurashi are evening cicadas, and are amazingly loud (h t t p : / / k i m o t o . c c / y k k / s e m i . h t m l).

- Cold soba is a very popular dish in Japan during the summer, and is typically served with a much broader range of condiments (Kogata's just poor).

- Believe it or not, the age of majority in Japan is really twenty. Go figure.

- And finally, Kaiba's scientific fact is in fact both scientific and factual. Also easily googled.


	4. Golden Wheel

**Notes:** Holy shit, sorry for the delay, guys. FFN was being a total douchewaffle yesterday and wouldn't let me put any new documents in the document manager. Seriously, wtf?

Also, the notes at the end of this chapter are ungodly long. I've included them for now, but if you'd like to read them separately (including the parts I couldn't include here for formatting reasons), follow this link: h t t p : / / t e n i k a . l i v e j o u r n a l . c o m / 8 1 5 2 4 . h t m l

And for a surprise, follow this link!: h t t p : / / t e n i k a . l i v e j o u r n a l . c o m / 8 1 3 1 8 . h t m l. (come on, you know you want to)

**Start Four  
_Golden Wheel_**

They played for nearly four hours before Kaiba at last won a game, by which point the victory had all but lost any magic it might once have contained. Jounouchi had long since discovered a clock beside the door, and glancing up at it as Kaiba finally, _finally_ collected all the cards, he found the short hand past midnight, and rubbed one hand over his eyes in exhaustion.

They'd talked off and on throughout the matches, but only intermittently, and never for very long; Kaiba was too busy focusing, as was Jounouchi after he misread the number on a card for the third time in a row and got a painfully wordy two-minute lecture on devotion for his troubles.

But they were done. They were _done_, damnit. "Feel better?" Jounouchi muttered, slumping even more against the desk and pressing his thumbs into his temples, trying to shove out as much of the brain ache as possible.

"Yes," Kaiba said quietly, but there was something about it--maybe just how reserved it was, maybe some underlying tone--that made Jounouchi's head lift again.

Kaiba looked..._pathetic_, sitting there in his grey socks and holding the deck in his spidery, long hands like some kind of trophy. His face was expressionless, turned down to stare at them, as though he'd been expecting something more to happen.

And just as Jounouchi had been afraid, like a punch to the ribs, he felt sorry for him.

He actually felt sorry for Kaiba. _Kaiba_, the asshole, the snob, the guy who at eighteen was still moving through the world with every intention of devoting the rest of his life to making games for kids, for all that Jounouchi had never been able to imagine him being genuinely nice to one who wasn't family. Kaiba, who in that moment looked for all the world like he'd never gotten over being twelve, and probably knowing he was a genius even then.

Jounouchi wondered if he'd _ever_ gotten on with anyone besides his brother, and realized suddenly how unlikely that was, how much he must have scared the kids his age. He remembered being twelve, and knew that, given the choice, he never would have played with someone like Kaiba. More likely he would have broken his nose and stolen the small change from his pockets.

"You were in an orphanage once, right?" Jounouchi wasn't sure what had called this into his head, but he had asked before he could stop and think about it.

Instantly the image was gone; Kaiba was eighteen and defensive again, staring at him with narrowed eyes and reaching into one of his pockets to pull out a rubber band for the deck. "That's correct."

Wow, he'd actually been right. "How'd you get out? I mean, how'd you get old man Kaiba to take you?"

Kaiba stood, setting the cards on the desk and opening one of his laptops. There was a very small, very strange smile on his face. "I made a bet with him."

Of course he had. Struggling into a slightly less hunched position, Jounouchi watched him sit down in the desk chair and log on. "Oh yeah?"

"Kaiba Gozaburo's claim to fame before his entrepreneurial successes was his standing as a chess champion," Kaiba explained quietly, beginning to type as he did. "I knew that, and took advantage of it. I bet that I could win a game against him, and that if I succeeded, he would have to adopt both Mokuba and myself. And I won."

"How old were you?"

"Twelve."

Oh, _creepy_. Jounouchi shuddered in spite of himself, climbing unsteadily to his feet. "Lucky you won, huh?"

Kaiba didn't respond to that for a surprisingly long moment, long enough that Jounouchi again turned around to look at him.

He was staring fixedly at the desk, a complex but unnamable expression on his face. Jounouchi couldn't have put a word to it if he'd tried, and didn't particularly want to.

But all Kaiba eventually said was, "Yes. I've always been good with strategy."

Then he shook himself, turning to frown at Jounouchi in a much more familiar way. "You can go now."

Jounouchi was torn about this. On the one hand, it would be nice to get back to his own familiar room, where he could dislike Kaiba in comfort and not be forced to spend time thinking about what a sad kid he must have been to grow up into such a sad near-adult.

On the other hand, he didn't want to go back to his apartment just to sit in the dark by himself for the next six hours on the off chance that he might be able to sleep. The way he figured it at this point, his best option was going to be to stop trying, to stay awake as long as he possibly could and just wait until his body took over and knocked him out. It would happen eventually, and hopefully while he was out everything would shuffle more or less back into place, and he'd wake up himself again.

Kaiba might be a jerk, but at least he was company. Jounouchi wondered if he ever felt the same way, if on nights like this Kaiba sometimes wished for somebody to be there, just to absorb the silence.

So Jounouchi hedged, unable to go one way or the other. "Yeah, I guess," he agreed, shoved his hands into his pockets and wandered around through the books for a minute or two. Kaiba ignored him, engrossed in whatever he was doing on the laptop.

Jounouchi came across a tall stack of thick manga and picked one up, eyeing it appraisingly. He hadn't expected to see comics mixed in with all the textbooks. When he got a look at the artist's name, however, the surprise dissipated instantly. "Tezuka Osamu?"

Kaiba turned to look, eyeing the book, then nodding sharply. "Buddha."

"It any good?" Jounouchi set it back on the stack carefully as he asked, reluctant to repeat the morning's fiasco. "I never liked his other shit much. Too druggy."

"I think it's one of his better pieces," Kaiba replied coolly, "_and_ that you just proved once and for all what an uncultured slob you really are. I suppose you read American comics?"

Jounouchi tried not to be offended at this, but it was hard. American comics were _awesome_. "Yeah, mostly. I like Otomo's stuff, though."

"Akira," Kaiba snorted, turning back to his laptop with a light shake of his head. "I should have guessed. Why exactly are you still here?"

"No reason," Jounouchi said hotly, resisting the urge to kick one of the stacks over just for the sake of being a shithead; "I just like being made fun of. What else do you got? Comics, I mean."

Kaiba was beginning to look irritated, his typing growing pointedly louder. "I don't suppose you'd know Shirou Masamune?"

"Ghost in the Shell," Jounouchi replied promptly, relieved that he actually did. Not that he'd ever done more than flip through it. "Not my thing. Too deep. His chicks are hot, though."

"You really don't like to think, do you."

"About as much as _you_ like being nice, dickhead."

"Being nice is a waste of both time and energy," Kaiba declared precisely, and smacked the enter key with great force.

Jounouchi managed a sneer that was at once delicate and completely obscene. "So's thinking."

He went for the door then, moving quickly in an effort to escape the inevitable comeback Kaiba would throw at that if he got enough time. "I'm outta here. Have fun doing whatever you're doing, moneybags. _Alone_."

Though Jounouchi made it across the room fast, he knew it wasn't fast enough to escape a response--or wouldn't have been on a normal night. But this time Kaiba just sat there staring at his laptop, no longer typing, and remained that way until Jounouchi shut the door on him.

-

He made it halfway across the lawn before stopping to swear at nothing for a few minutes, kicking up pieces of the perfectly manicured turf and wondering furiously why he felt like such an asshole when _he'd_ been the one Kaiba was mocking.

"How does he fucking _do_ that?" he hissed up at the stars, and grabbed at his hair when they failed to provide a good answer. "Fuck. He's just--"

Lonely. He looked lonely. That was the problem, and Jounouchi had attacked it directly, cruelly. Now he couldn't get that sorry image out of his head, Kaiba sitting there at his desk and just taking it.

"What the hell?" he found himself muttering, shaking his head in mingled frustration and confusion. "Why'd he do that? He _never_ just takes my shit, even when it's true. He should've had something to say."

Five minutes later Jounouchi still couldn't make himself leave, and finally, torn between being utterly infuriated and laughing at what a dumbass he was, stomped back into the house and up the stairs and through the door of Kaiba's study.

"So I had a thought," he began, and wondered what that thought was going to be.

Kaiba turned around to stare at him in obvious surprise, both eyebrows lifted.

"I'll call our teachers," he managed after a second, apparently willing to take this new development in stride. "They'll be overjoyed to know they finally had some success."

"Do you have a hat?"

This was apparently out of Kaiba's stride. His mouth opened a little in surprise, his face going from faint curiosity to open incredulity. "Do I _what?_"

"Have a hat," Jounouchi repeated, and finally figured out where he was going with this. "It's just that you got that deck of cards, and if you have a hat too then I can try out the card tossing game. I saw it in a movie once. But see, I never had my own hat, so I couldn't ever give it a shot. I always wanted to."

Kaiba didn't have an immediate response to this, or even a slightly less than immediate one. Eventually he went the non-verbal route and shook his head, a faint edge of wonder slipping into his expression. "I honestly thought I'd seen the limits of your randomness, Jounouchi."

A few seconds of quiet were allowed to pass, followed by Kaiba shaking his head once more and standing. "I'll be right back."

-

So the game was awesome, but frustrating. Apparently Jounouchi couldn't aim to save his life, and so far he'd managed to go through half the deck without getting a single card in the upturned fedora. (Absently Jounouchi wondered why Kaiba even owned a fedora, and even more absently if he'd ever actually worn it.)

He had settled against the wall beside Kaiba's desk with the hat placed halfway across the room from him, the stacks of books acting as obstacles dividing him from his goal. Kaiba had furthermore relieved some of the oppressive quiet by turning on a normal-looking radio hooked up to a very abnormal-looking _something_--it was black and covered in many knobs, with an antenna the size of fucking Hokkaido--which in turn hooked into the wall, and gave it what seemed to be unlimited access to not only all of the radio stations in Japan, but apparently a few from other countries as well.

Jounouchi had plans to examine this more thoroughly as soon as the opportunity presented itself, but was prepared to wait until Tuesday night if he had to.

"Oi. Oi, Kaiba."

"...mm."

"_Kaiba_."

"_What?_" Kaiba snapped, turning a frustrated, put-upon glare over his shoulder.

Jounouchi paused, lifting his head from its singular angle of focus on the hat and purposefully giving him the weirdest look he was capable of producing before turning back to his game. "Jeez," he muttered, lowering his hand a fraction of a molecule (or, more realistically, a couple of inches) and flicking his fingers to toss another card. Like so many of the others, it fell short. "I was just making sure you heard me. Touchy much?"

"_Very_ much," Kaiba muttered, turning back to his laptop. "This install is going to hell in a hand basket. Talk. You have fifteen seconds."

Another card fell short of the hat's edge. Jounouchi made a face, both at it and Kaiba's tone. "You speak English, right?"

"That is correct," said Kaiba, smacking a key with particular force. The tell-tale chime of an automatic alert appearing promptly followed this. "_Damn_--"

"_So_," Jounouchi interrupted quickly, the edge of his next card bouncing off the rim of the hat, propelling it farther away than all the others, "you could, uh, theoretically translate this weird-ass song, right?"

Kaiba paused. "What?"

"Weird-ass song," Jounouchi repeated, stopping for a moment to point at the magical radio, which was currently playing what sounded like a disgustingly bouncy American rock number. "You know, music. Chords. Instruments. All arranged and stuff. With notes. You could translate this, right?"

The withering look Kaiba shot him was hardly intimidating; Jounouchi just went back to his game and waited for him to stop being such a bitch.

"Yes," Kaiba said after a moment, as coldly as possible. "If you must know, I would be capable of something that inane."

Another moment passed. Jounouchi's next card missed as well. He wrinkled his nose. "_So_," he prompted again, exasperated, preparing to toss another one. "What's he saying?"

"Jounouchi," Kaiba said with a dark, slow smirk, watching in Jounouchi's peripheral vision as he took aim, "the day I bend over backwards to fill such a pointless request for _you_ is the day you develop some modicum of hand-eye coordination and score even _one_ point in that ridiculous waste of time you call a game. In smaller and simpler words, _figure it out on your own_."

Jounouchi's next card sailed straight into the hat.

Neither teen moved for a moment, both busy staring at the miracle in miniature. Jounouchi had a fleeting thought that maybe he could get turned into a saint for this: Jounouchi-sama, who once made a total stooge out of one who deserved it.

Then Kaiba tilted his head back, closing his eyes (possibly searching for some sort of inner calm), and murmured to the ceiling, "No one is that lucky. No one, no one, no one, no one, _no one_..."

He knew he was grinning foolishly, but Jounouchi couldn't help himself, pointing at the hat in his excitement. "Look at that!" he crowed aloud. "I'd call _that_ a point, moneybags! _Damn_." He patted himself on the back quickly, then turned to point at the other teen next. "Right! Let's hear some translation, moneybags. And it better be _nice_. I mean, you're bending over backwards for this."

Kaiba began to rub his temples. Eyes still shut, he pushed out an exhausted sigh through his nose, but eventually began to relate in a quick, irritated tone, "_I love you more than I did the week before I discovered alcohol, oh alcohol, would you please forgive me, for while I cannot love myself, I'll use something else..._"

The next card slipped unnoticed from Jounouchi's fingers, dropping noiselessly into his lap. Kaiba continued, oblivious, still speaking in that same flat tone: "_I thought that alcohol was just for those with nothing else to do, I thought that drinking just to get drunk was a waste of precious booze, but now I know that there's a time and there's a place where I can choose to walk the fine line between self-control and self-abuse--_"

"Fine," Jounouchi heard himself say sharply, surprised at how curt his own voice was. He couldn't quite take his eyes from the hat, meaning he missed whatever look passed across Kaiba's face at his reaction, interest or irritation or whatever. "That's--fine. Thanks. Sorry to bother you."

He tossed the next card so hard that it hit the opposite wall, spinning away to fall some inches from the white molding. A moment passed before he finally heard Kaiba beginning to type again, returning to his previous task. The song ended.

How could anybody actually write about that? For a song that sounded like it was supposed to be _funny?_ Jounouchi took a deep breath, shoulders slumping a little.

He shouldn't have asked. That was more than he'd wanted to contemplate right then, or ever. Americans were just disturbing.

He wondered what his father would have said to those sentiments.

-

Jounouchi left the mansion around two and went back to his apartment, where he gave up temporarily on his resolution to stay awake until he passed out by getting into his futon and trying to sleep. He attempted this for about an hour before deciding once and for all that his first solution was in fact the best, and got up to do some homework instead, then took a quick bath and got dressed for school.

School itself was a blur of activity and noise, and Jounouchi, exhausted, skipped P.E. for the first time in years. He just didn't feel like wasting the energy on it, as fun as it was to have an excuse to throw dodge balls at people _really hard_.

Once it was over he went home and ate, did a little more homework, tried to study for about twenty seconds, then gave up and went to lie in his futon just for the hell of it. If he fell asleep, oh well. If he didn't...well, oh well.

The verdict in the end was _didn't_, and Jounouchi got up with the worst headache yet, and a bizarre sense of not only vertigo, but randomness. As in, weird thoughts kept popping in and out of his head, and as he was making dinner for himself he kept putting things back in the wrong places. He thought his dad came home for a short while, but found by the time he'd finished eating that he couldn't remember, and wondered if this was a bad sign.

Then he thought of the radio in Kaiba's house, and the next thing he knew he was halfway there. The security guard, recognizing him from the night before, let him through the gate without making him wait, and feeling very much as though he had only left for a few minutes, Jounouchi made his way up to the door and knocked hard.

The sun had gone down half an hour before he'd set out, meaning it was probably about nine, but it was still Mokuba who answered the door.

Jounouchi wasn't exactly crazy about the look he got at this point (like, what right did he have to be there?), but bore up under it pretty well. "You're back again?"

"Yeah, it's a bummer, isn't it?" Jounouchi replied, and kicking his shoes off, jogged up the stairs without waiting for a reply.

Upon entering Kaiba's study for the third time (fourth if he counted his short-lived exodus last night), it finally occurred to Jounouchi that there was no doorstop on the wall the door opened into, and accordingly he made a note to put an impressive dent in the plaster with the handle if Kaiba was ever too much of a shithead in the near future.

"I've become so popular," Kaiba drawled from across the room, drawing Jounouchi's eyes away from the wall.

_Now_ things looked different, owing to the two bookcases which had appeared between Jounouchi's last visit and the present. Most of the books on the floor had been collected and shelved by now, and the room suddenly looked a hell of a lot bigger for it. For the first time Jounouchi noticed that there was actually a rug by the desk.

"Wow," he said out loud, taking a look around. "I thought you liked your piles?"

"I did," Kaiba replied calmly, hefting three books in one hand and two in another. "Then I stopped. Did you leave something last night?"

"Nah," Jounouchi said, walking toward him, only to pause a few feet away, hands in his pockets. "I was gonna ask if I could mess around with your radio. If I helped with those would you let me? I promise I'll be outta your hair before midnight this time."

Kaiba hesitated for a second, but apparently deemed this a safe enough agreement, and nodded his assent. "So long as you remember that it costs more money than you'd ever be able to repay in your lifetime. Not that I wouldn't make you try."

"'Course," Jounouchi agreed, and bent down to pick up some books for himself.

It was close to the bottom of his second stack that Jounouchi encountered, to his surprise, a piece of paper with a calendar spread of the month of October printed across it. The twenty fifth had been circled vigorously in red, and written beside it in the same red ink the message, "_Nii-san, look at that! It's coming up again! Would you **please** spare me this year and actually ask for something?_"

Jounouchi couldn't help but grin at this reminder that even a little toe rag like Mokuba could be brotherly and affectionate. Then he actually took note of the day that was circled, and hummed his surprise. "Kaiba, your birthday's the twenty fifth too?"

Kaiba turned to look at what he was holding, and for just a second there was in his face the tiniest, tiniest expression of warmth. "I thought I lost that," he murmured. Then his eyes sharpened, the expression disappearing. "You were born in the fall?"

"No, January, January," Jounouchi corrected, handing the paper to him. "But it's the same day. That's weird." Then he went back to lifting and shelving books, done marveling at the coincidence.

Kaiba, however, was still lost in thought, and remained that way for several seconds, until abruptly he turned to stare at Jounouchi in something that was at once surprise and horrible, dark amusement. "You're younger than me, aren't you?"

Jounouchi bristled, suspicious. "Only by a few months, asshole."

"But that means you were born the year after me," Kaiba persisted, still wearing that creepy look.

Unable to deny it, Jounouchi nodded slowly.

The smirk got wider. "So you were actually born in the--"

Oh _fuck_. "Don't say it, you--"

But Kaiba said it anyway, speaking over him: "--year of the dog? You're _actually a dog?_"

Jounouchi glared at him miserably. "I can't believe you have the fucking zodiac _memorized_."

"_I_ can't believe I didn't realize that before now," Kaiba marveled, about three seconds away from grinning outright. "Allow me to enjoy this for a moment."

Jounouchi wondered how it was that he'd ever felt sorry for the guy.

-

"Why don't you take sleeping pills, Kaiba? It's not like you can't afford 'em."

Jounouchi turned down the magical radio device to ask this, having only just thought of it. He was sitting on the floor next to it, and had been for about an hour, prodding at its various pieces and realizing that he would maybe never understand how exactly it worked, but would all the same never stop finding it totally fascinating. It was like he was actually hopping around the world himself, something he'd never thought he'd be able to do.

All the books being neatly housed in their new shelves, Kaiba had returned once more to his desk, where he'd promptly thrown himself into what looked like the same homework Jounouchi had been whittling away at earlier. He glanced up discerningly for a few seconds at the question, then returned to his work, responding without looking at Jounouchi: "Several reasons. They only correct temporarily, and often disturb the body more than the initial problem. Mostly they're addictive. It's difficult to control the dosage with a solid pill if you want to operate outside of standard dosages. And very few of them actually work for me. I understand melatonin is a good natural supplement, but I haven't tried it yet."

...so basically all the reasons Jounouchi had thought they sounded like a bad idea to begin with. Good to know.

"Why? I'm not giving you any, if that's what you're wondering."

"No," Jounouchi snorted, switching channels again, "you can keep that shit. Just, y'know, a passing thought."

-

Wednesday morning.

Jounouchi still hadn't slept. He'd gotten back to his apartment from Kaiba's by half past eleven, and then...nothing. More homework. Another bath. More food. All the hours were starting to blur together, but he did his best to ignore this, to keep functioning normally.

Which was, of course, pretty much impossible. He looked at himself in the mirror without meaning to as he was putting his school uniform on, and was startled by how _bad_ his reflection appeared. He was clean thanks to his bath, his hair damp and relatively neat, but the bags beneath his eyes were _ridiculous_, and he was a lot paler than normal.

His body, furthermore, had begun to hurt all over, to the point where it was difficult to move both quickly and coordinately at the same time; he had to focus on either one or the other to fully achieve it. But Jounouchi was determined to outlast this thing, and figured these had to be signs that he was getting close. It would kind of suck if he passed out at school, but he could smooth it over once he woke up. No need to worry.

But people still looked worried. Particularly Honda.

"I dunno, man," he said at school that afternoon. "You're just acting weird. Like, you're spacing out _way_ more than usual, and what the hell was that you were saying an hour ago? I mean, I know you're kinda crazy anyway, but that was real crazy talk." His voice lowered, his expression growing both vaguely suspicious and overtly concerned: "You're not on anything, right? I'm not gonna have to kick your ass for dipping into some bad shit for these mocks?"

"_No_," Jounouchi hissed back, offended by the thought, and looked around to make sure Yuugi wasn't within ear shot. He'd never hear the end of it if the kid got it into his head that he was on drugs. "I'm just tired, okay? I haven't slept in a while. It's all this fucking studying."

Honda still looked a little suspicious, but accepted this eventually, nodding once. "So long as you're sure, I guess. You wanna forget about our thing tonight?"

Huh? "What thing?"

"Our _study_ thing, man. At Yuugi's place, remember? Tonight and tomorrow, eight o'clock? Anzu's coming too? Fuck, are you _sure_--"

"Yeah, yeah," Jounouchi said quickly, cutting him off before he could get started again. "I'll go. I can do it." He didn't _want_ to go, but they'd just worry more if he didn't. Better to get it over with quick.

-

Sitting in Yuugi's game room at ten in the evening and trying to pay attention to Honda reading some of their printed biology notes out loud, however, Jounouchi was forced to at last admit that this hadn't been one of his better ideas.

He couldn't _focus_, and it didn't help at all that he seriously doubted Honda was pronouncing any of this shit right. But Anzu hadn't jumped in to correct him yet, so he had to hold his tongue, as much as he wanted to grab the guy by his shirt and make him give them to someone else.

"Prokaryotes comprise the most ancient lineage of life as we know it," Honda was currently reading falteringly, "and are in many ways considerably less complex than their eu...uh, eukaryotic counterparts. Significantly, instead of a nucleus, prokaryotes are possessed of a nucleoid, reproduce mainly by a process known as prokaryotic fission, and perform the majority of their metabolic reactions at either the plasma membrane or cytoplasmic levels. Prokaryotes also, unlike most eukaryotes, are possessed of a cell wall which encloses the plasma membrane--"

No way. Jounouchi had managed to hold out for two hours, but there was just _no way_ he was going to remember this if he wasn't writing it down himself.

"Honda," he interrupted, staring at him with all the movie-star intensity he could muster (_think Rashomon, man--you **are** Tajomaru, you **breathe** Tajomaru_), "there's no fucking way I'm gonna remember any of that."

"Then it's _your_ balls in the vice next week," Honda shot back, pointing at him rudely. "You promised you would at least try, right? And you said you were up to doing this?"

Fucker. "...yeah."

"Then fucking do it." Honda glanced back down at the book, then prompted loudly, "So prokaryotes. They've got cell walls. What other things have them too?"

"Prisons?" Jounouchi tried.

Yuugi began to cough suspiciously, setting down his teacup with a rattle. Anzu slid over beside him on the couch and applied a few good thumps between his shoulders blades, attempting to hide a smile the whole time and doing a piss-poor job of it. Honda didn't even try, just slapped a hand over his face in exasperation. "Fucking _plants_, man. Have you been sleeping in class all this time instead of at home?"

Frustrated, Jounouchi scrubbed the heel of one hand hard into his right eye and tried not to grimace. Didn't he _wish_.

-

He didn't manage to claw his way free until eleven o'clock, by which point he seriously suspected that his brain was all but three seconds away from liquefying. It sure _felt_ like liquid, the thing sloshing crazily around, making him dizzy, making everything fuzz up, blur.

The three of them looked kind of worried watching him go, but it was hard to tell whether this was because they could see something was seriously wrong, or rather because they were just beginning to realize there was _no way in the known universe_ he was actually going to pass these mock exams, let alone the real ones.

And if Jounouchi hadn't hated the insomnia before, he had definitely gotten there by now. His chances had never been good, but this whole not-sleeping thing had pretty effectively staked that reality down. He might have managed to pull it off if he'd been able to organize his time better before.

He headed straight for Kaiba's place, figuring it was closer than his own, and that his nightly heckling session was just about due. This whole actively trying to avoid sleep thing was hard, a lot harder than he'd ever expected, and he really didn't understand why it was taking so long for his body to give up and pass out. The whole thing ached now with a slow, steady fire, and the more he thought about it, the more he realized how much he was forgetting.

The buildings looked kind of weird on his way to Kaiba's, somehow unlike what he remembered. He didn't think he was taking a different route, but he was _certain_ the colors were off, and a few were definitely shorter, a few wider. It made him kind of nervous, but it was easy enough to ignore so long as he kept his eyes on the road, and carefully he did just that.

The one nice thing he'd noticed in all of this, between the memory loss and the pain, was that he was finally, _finally_ starting to feel a little cooler, and could only hope this meant the weather was evening out a bit.

The Kaiba mansion looked very much like itself once he reached it, however, and brushed away the sense of unease the walk had created in him. The security guard again let him in, this time with a very strange look, but thankfully no comment, and Jounouchi got Kaiba at the door instead of Mokuba, which was kind of nice.

Or would have been if Kaiba hadn't looked just as incredulous as his brother at the sight of him. "You're back _again?_"

"My mom used to say I was sorta like a fungus," Jounouchi snickered, and wondered why Kaiba didn't recognize how hilarious this was. "Yeah, I'm back. You sleeping yet?"

"Not much," Kaiba replied carefully, and looked for a second like he was considering the merits of not letting him in. Then he stepped back. "You?"

"Nothing since Sunday," Jounouchi replied lightly, shrugging as he kicked his shoes off. "It's weird, though, it's not so bad tonight. I mean, it is, but I keep kind of going between Zen and wondering if my head's finally hit the limit. Y'know, of how bad it can feel. Good thing it finally cooled off a little, right?"

Kaiba shot him an odd look. "In your area?"

Jounouchi paused on the bottom step of the staircase, frowning. "No, man, everywhere. Don't you feel it?"

"No," Kaiba said slowly, approaching him now. "But I suppose it could just be residual heat. The study windows are closed."

That made sense. Jounouchi couldn't help laughing at him for it, jogging the rest of the way up the stairs and turning around at the top to watch the CEO climbing sedately after him. "See, that's why you need to get out more."

"Are you sure you don't want to go home and sleep?" Kaiba wanted to know, still staring at him oddly.

Trying to get rid of him. Jounouchi rolled his eyes at that, wondering why the asshole couldn't ever just come out and say a thing. "I can nap on the floor if you're really worried, mom. But I wanna mess with your radio more first. Think I could pick up military stuff from America?"

Kaiba finally started to look irritated and normal at that, taking the lead. "You think I'd actually let you try?"

-

An hour flowed by, most of which Jounouchi spent curled up around the radio, flipping from channel to static to channel and again to static. He couldn't believe how infinite the range was turning out to be, and wondered why Kaiba hadn't ever started to put this wall-connector-thing on the market.

"_Because_," Kaiba replied very slowly when he asked, "what the 'wall-connector-thing' does is actually quite illegal. You should be glad you can't understand most of those languages you seem to find so amusing."

"Were you just born without a sense of humor?" Jounouchi mumbled, but Kaiba didn't pick up on it, and in the end he went back to the radio.

After another half hour, however, it got too hard to concentrate on all the numbers, which he could have sworn were rearranging themselves on him. Irritated, he turned onto his back and settled for instead watching Kaiba switch between typing furiously and writing things by hand across a series of charts, pausing occasionally to stare at his figures and tap his mouth slowly with his fingertips.

And that was _fascinating_ somehow. He hadn't really realized how long Kaiba's fingers actually were, and--no, no, nothing having to do with Kaiba could be fascinating, but it _was_ sort of cool. Jounouchi blinked once hard, trying to clear some of the ache from his eyes so he could focus better, and shot a quick glance out the windows to see if the moon had appeared yet, then turned back just in time to watch Kaiba slip a lit cigarette into his mouth.

...wait. _Wait_. Jounouchi frowned in confusion, staring at the other teen twice as hard as before. "Since when do you _smoke_, asshole?"

Kaiba looked up at him, also frowning, the cigarette bobbing slowly up and down between his lips, as though he was working it with his teeth. Smoke curled lazily out of his nose, drifting up to the ceiling in strange, pale spirals. "What the hell are you talking about?" he demanded, the words slightly muffled around the object in his mouth. "I don't, moron."

Jounouchi blinked again.

Kaiba had a pen in his mouth. The smoke had vanished, like the after image of a bright light fading away beneath closed eyelids.

Oh. Oh, wow. Jounouchi couldn't keep his mouth from dropping open, or the reverent, "Holy _shit_," from slipping out.

He'd just fucking _hallucinated_.

"What?" If Jounouchi hadn't known him he would have said Kaiba looked concerned; but he did know him, and was aware of how impossible that was. He looked...perturbed. Was that the right word? Perturbed and irritated. "What's wrong?"

"I just--" For a moment Jounouchi floundered, trying to think of some way to say it that didn't sound insane. He couldn't, however, and eventually answered, hesitantly, "I just thought you were smoking. Like, that pen--for a second it just looked like a cigarette. And there was, like, smoke. A bunch of it. _Shit_."

Kaiba said nothing, but his expression had closed suspiciously, the kind of face he wore when he was more worried about something than he wanted to admit, and was trying to puzzle it out. For some reason that scared Jounouchi way more than the hallucination itself had, sent his heart racing uncomfortably around his chest. The low lighting of the room felt suddenly oppressive, the darkness of the world outside pressing strangely inward, moving toward him.

"Shit," he said again, quietly. "What's that mean? Is my brain about to fall out or something?"

Kaiba's mouth pursed slowly. Jounouchi couldn't be sure, of course, but it looked like he was trying to measure his expression very carefully--trying to return from a mental overreaction, or trying to calm Jounouchi down for the news he was about to deliver?

Kaiba said, "You might want sit in one of the chairs for a little while."

Jounouchi's stomach turned over.

Apparently his expression conveyed this perfectly, because almost immediately Kaiba lifted a hand, as though placating an animal. "It's not imminently bad. You just need to sleep a little before it gets worse. Even if you can't sleep you should rest. But don't panic."

This wasn't exactly soothing, but Jounouchi was too freaked out at the moment to be ungrateful. "Okay," he agreed, and stumbled up shakily, making his way to the chair closest to the window and folding himself into it. He had a good profile view of Kaiba here, so he could keep an eye on the guy's expressions.

"I'm going to work more now," Kaiba said slowly, and for a second Jounouchi wondered why he'd bothered to mention it--he'd already turned back toward the desk--before it occurred to him that Kaiba was actually trying to keep him clued in to reality. In case he saw something again.

Staring at him from the chair, Jounouchi hung on to the words as a distraction, trying to slow his breathing in the meantime: "Just close your eyes first. I should only need another hour here, so stay in the chair until your feet start to feel better, and then we'll see what we can do about letting you outside for a walk..."

Wide-eyed, Jounouchi realized that this--what was this, was Kaiba actually saying that?--wasn't matching the motions of Kaiba's mouth--Kaiba's mouth--Kaiba was facing the desk still, and then all of a sudden his jaw distended with a wet, snake-like click, dropped wider and wider like some kind of grotesque parody of a gulper eel--

The words were still running in the background, "--too bad you'll have to go blind after all, but it's your father's fault, really, and I wouldn't eat for a while if I were you--"

--and Kaiba's head dropped heavily forward onto the desk, the gaping, horrible mouth working--he was _eating_ the post-it notes and charts with a dry, rough sound, the sound of paper and wood on skin--

Jounouchi slapped his hands over his eyes. Then he buried his face in his knees for good measure, horrified, this was _horrible_--he didn't want that in his head, why the _fuck_ was that in his head?

"Jounouchi? _Jounouchi_."

It took him a moment to realize that the ominous running dialogue had faded back into these simple repetitions of his name. But he didn't trust himself to look up and see something normal. He didn't want to know what he'd see. His teeth began to chatter.

He stayed like this for what felt like an incredibly long time, the sound of footsteps pounding in and out of his skull, until out of nowhere a hand touched his arm gently.

"Jounouchi."

"Go the fuck away," Jounouchi whispered. "If I look you'll go weird again."

"Just hold your hand out."

Jounouchi hesitated, frightened to do what he said, scared this was another hallucination. But after a moment he obeyed, holding one hand out, his fingers trembling.

Something small was placed right in the center of his palm. "Try that. They don't work for me, but for you they might. It's not a high dosage. Just put it in your mouth and swallow."

Jounouchi wasn't sure what made him believe Kaiba--some intuition, maybe--but he did, slipped the pill in his mouth and dry swallowed, grimacing as it went down, and at the sour, chalky flavor, the way it dried his throat in seconds.

And then even though he was cool he was suddenly sweating so much he was making water, he could feel water lapping around his legs, but--but obviously that wasn't real either. Jounouchi kept working his throat over and over, swallowed and swallowed, and the water reached up all around him, got in his nose, his ears, and he still kept breathing. He kept breathing, breathed in and out.

And the water was abruptly wonderful, comforting, warm inside his lungs with his blood, inside his head, cushioning him all around. It felt familiar, essential, and it was the easiest thing in the world to sink into it, to let go of the fear and fall instead into this perfect feeling of safety, of being so inexplicably, wonderfully, peacefully reborn.

_end four_

**end notes**  
- Okay, so in chapter 40 of the original manga Mokuba actually tells the gang all about their sojourn in the orphanage, but I'm pretending here that Jounouchi: a) wasn't listening, or b) doesn't remember. Seto had also just had the holy hell mind crushed out of him and was busy picking up the pieces of his shattered evil heart, so he has no clue that Mokuba spilled the beans at all, regardless of whether Jounouchi was listening or not. Finally, I have altered the original timeline a little, in that I've had Mokuba and Seto's father die when they were 5 and 10 (respectively) instead of 3 and 8. This means Seto only had four years with Gozaburo instead of his original six, but I figure four is still plenty.

- I'm sure many of you recognized the mangaka names, but for those who didn't, check out the extended version of these notes on LJ (there's a permanent link in my profile). :D

- No, the magical radio device isn't real. Fictional characters get all the cool toys.

- Poor Jounouchi. Little does he know that the Barenaked Ladies are actually Canadian. And speaking of those lovely manladies, its SONG CREDIT TIME: "Alcohol" is copyright **Barenaked Ladies**, and is number six on the record _Stunt_, released July 7th, 1998, on the Reprise/Wea label. I DON'T OWN IT. Furthermore, I cannot magically make you hear this song's tune by copying its lyrics into this fic, nor can I assist anybody in illegally nabbing it. You'll just have to figure that part out on your own. (re: sarcasm)

- The notes on the birthdays mentioned so briefly in this chapter actually got so long that I've decided to separate them out and include them only at the end of the LJ equivalent of this list. Sorry, but I can't footnote things in this format (and let's not talk about how embarrassing it is that I actually had to footnote something).

- Kaiba's diatribe on why he doesn't take sleeping pills is a combination of his personal opinion and scientific fact: I encourage anyone who wants to know more to start some independent research on the topic. One thing he mentions in particular, however, is melatonin, which many people don't seem to know about.

Melatonin is a hormone produced naturally by the brain which fulfills several functions, most notably regulation of the circadian rhythm (in other words, regulation of sleep patterns). It's also an antioxidant that focuses on protection of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, but somehow I doubt many of you care about that. The important point is that, while many people online jabber on about its uses as a dietary supplement (which seriously, wtf? this makes no sense to me), encapsulated melatonin is a really awesome, totally natural sleep aid, and has helped various members of my family out of several really bad bouts of insomnia. The only danger I can think of with reference to it is dependence (that is, you start to think you can't fall asleep if you don't take it), but that's a mental difficulty, not a by-product of addiction (you don't experience a physical craving for the melatonin like you do for alcohol or nicotine).

- Honda's exposition on the morphology of prokaryotes is largely paraphrased from page 334 of Starr and Taggart's "Diversity of Life," Unit IV in the textbook "Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life," encompassing chapters 21-27, pages 331-476.

- Tajomaru is the name of the bandit in Akutagawa Ryuunosuke's short story In a Grove, which was later combined with his short story Rashomon by Kurosawa Akira for his 1950 film Rashomon. In the film he was played by Mifune Toshirou, who was easily the most famous Japanese actor of his day, and highly valued for his ability to show intense emotional depth and range, particularly in his common portrayal of a rough, but nevertheless honorable warrior-figure. This guy could kill you with his eyes. (Think our cowboys--Clint Eastwood, John Wayne--combined with Humphrey Bogart, only handsome.)


	5. Lotus

**Start Five  
_Lotus_**

Jounouchi opened eyes that felt as heavy as cement blocks, found that they hadn't opened after all, and had to try three more times before a sliver of light appeared in his vision. His head pounded instantly in protest. His mouth was so dry that he almost couldn't dislodge his tongue enough to speak: "...any water here?"

He wasn't sure who he was asking, but a moment later cool glass was pressed against...skin, that was some of his skin. His arm. Someone was pressing a glass against his arm.

Jounouchi reached for it groggily, got a good grip with one hand, and slowly tilted his head back on a neck like a fruit peel to drain the whole thing.

Somebody took the glass back. Jounouchi rested his cheek on one of his knees, breathing slowly through his nose.

"I'm afraid you won't feel very rested," a voice said from very far away, deep and steady. "That was essentially a tranquilizer, not a sleep aid. But I thought it might take enough of the edge off to let you sleep now. Try. Keep your eyes closed."

That sounded like a wonderful idea to Jounouchi, who was very good at trying, and who had to smile at its brilliance. "Thanks, Kaiba."

A moment of silence. Then, very soft: "You're welcome."

-

Jounouchi woke again and fell out of his chair.

"How long was I out?" he asked the floor.

"Three hours," Kaiba replied. Sounded like he was somewhere on the other side of the room. "Just enough to start over around day two, I believe. You really are having a problem, aren't you? Your body should have taken that as an opportunity to start restoring your proper circadian rhythm, not let you wake back up."

"Welcome to my life," Jounouchi mumbled, and finally pushed himself onto his arms, blinking furiously. The floor appeared and reappeared like the tail end of an old film reel. "What time is it?"

"Seven o'clock. Thursday the thirteenth, if you're curious. Happy Obon. You should go home."

"Gotta go to school," Jounouchi replied firmly, absolutely certain of this, and climbed to his feet with a grunt, pressing his hands over his eyes. He almost fell over, but managed to avoid it in the end.

"Don't be an idiot," Kaiba said impatiently, and Jounouchi could hear him getting up from whatever chair he'd been sitting in. "Go home and get some more rest. They won't fail you for missing one day."

Jounouchi started to shake his head, but then he remembered that his uniform was at home anyway, along with all the homework he'd done last night. Realizing that Kaiba was furthermore not going to let this one go, Jounouchi nodded in pretend agreement, taking his hands away from his eyes and staring blearily at the other teen.

He looked bad, but definitely not at bad as Jounouchi probably did. It was still mostly in his eyes, which had begun to look like they were in imminent danger of sinking into his head.

God, had he actually helped Jounouchi through all of that? He couldn't even remember the majority of what had happened, but he could call some of it back in flashes--that horrific vision of his stretched face on the desk, the feel of a water glass against his arm.

"I'll go home," Jounouchi said quietly.

"Good," Kaiba said, his eyes narrowed. "Today's not the right day to be stubborn."

Then he picked up his school bag and went to stand by the door, waiting for Jounouchi to join him. This the blond did with surprising ease; he really hadn't realized how weak he'd gotten since Tuesday. He yawned widely, scuffing his hair with one hand, only to encounter--to put it mildly--a ridiculous mess of sweat-induced tangles. Fuck.

"You sleep at all, moneybags?" Jounouchi asked as they headed down the stairs.

"A few hours before you arrived," Kaiba replied clinically, not looking at him. "But I am, as you're so fond of saying, a freak. I'll make it until tonight."

"Got plans for knocking yourself out?"

"Something like that," Kaiba said cryptically, and opened the front door. "Try not to get hit by a car on your way back. It would be too embarrassing after devoting all that time to staving off your nervous breakdown."

-

Some of the houses on the way back already had candles or small braziers placed out front to guide their ancestors' spirits, as yet unlit. There would be more by the time it got dark again, and then the real buildup to the big festival Saturday night would start, before those who had family graves outside of Domino left on Sunday to visit and help the spirits back. Jounouchi hadn't done anything more than visit the festival for years now, but distantly he remembered doing the rest as a little kid with his family, going to the Jounouchi grave to leave offerings and paper lanterns.

Jounouchi made it through this early holiday mess fast enough, disappointed to find as he went that the world had heated back up again--or rather that his coldness the day before had been part of the bad phase he'd hit. While it was a damn good thing he'd gotten past it in one sense, it was still a bummer to know that he'd once again have to simply put up with the heat until it went away normally. _No wonder Kaiba looked so weirded out._ _**Fuck**._

As soon as he got into his apartment Jounouchi made a beeline for the bath, where he ran a lukewarm tub of water and scrubbed until his skin was raw, dragging a comb forcefully through his hair and brushing his teeth with his fingers. The whole time he felt strange, as though part of him was still sleeping in the chair at Kaiba's place, and at the same time as though something was giving him an unexpected new vitality.

After a while the feeling receded, overtaken as he was in the process of putting his uniform on by a fresh uneasiness, until it at last occurred to him that what he was experiencing was _gratitude_; gratitude for everything Kaiba had done, and an overwhelming anger that he couldn't make that gratitude go away. He didn't _want_ to feel grateful to Kaiba.

So Jounouchi grabbed his school bag and set out, mouth set in determination. Fuck Kaiba's high-handedness, anyway. Nobody was a better judge of how much Jounouchi could handle than Jounouchi himself, right?

Fucking right.

-

He was only a half hour late for first period, but as usual, his charming grin completely failed to convince his teacher that this was an acceptable delay.

Fortunately, however, the fact that he had showed up at all earned him the usual leeway (Sadamoto-sensei always seemed to expect him to cut outright, despite the fact that he never had before, not without an excuse from work), and he was allowed to drop his messy homework sheet on top of the rest and find his seat with only a little lecturing. Honda flipped him off under his desk by way of greeting, grinning broadly.

For a moment Jounouchi was terribly disoriented, the full weight of what had almost happened last night finally crashing into him--he could have had that fucking episode alone in his apartment, and been too much of a mess to even think of getting up, let alone going to school--and Honda and Yuugi and Anzu and the rest of them, they had slept through the whole thing.

Then Jounouchi grinned and returned the gesture, leaning down to pull his book from his bag.

It was as he was sitting back up that he at last caught sight of Kaiba staring at him, face pale with anger, and preemptively began to brace for impact.

-

"You _idiot_," Kaiba hissed.

The break between first and second period had rolled around not two minutes before, and Kaiba was already standing and leaning over the desk next to his, having waited until the very second Jounouchi was alone to descend on him like a tidal wave. "You do understand that people have _died_ from sleep deprivation before, right?"

"Look," Jounouchi hissed back. He hadn't actually known that, but he could be creeped out about it later. "Thanks for everything you did, okay? But I'm fine. I mean, I'm _not_ fine, but I'm _better_, damnit. I know when I can handle--"

"_Bullshit_," Kaiba whispered furiously. "You must have been hallucinating _before_ you showed up last night, it's impossible for it to have progressed that fast otherwise. Did you even notice?"

...holy shit, all those weird colors. Of _course_. Why hadn't he realized that?

Swallowing, Jounouchi suppressed the urge to scowl and did a crappy job of it. "So I screwed up once. I can handle it now." Then something else occurred to him, and suspicious, he narrowed his eyes: "Anyway, why the fuck do you care? I mean, I get last night, but since when is it your business to make sure I'm taking care of myself when I'm not about to drop dead in your study?"

Apparently Jounouchi had thought of this before Kaiba, who drew back with a remarkably stunned expression on his face. "I--"

"Kaiba-san?"

Kaiba and Jounouchi looked over in unison, finding Yuugi standing uncertainly beside them. Honda was hovering threateningly at his back, staring at Kaiba with open dislike.

"Are you alright?" Yuugi asked carefully. More of their classmates were filing back in from break as he spoke, including the one whose desk Kaiba was accosting.

For a long second the brunet didn't respond. Then he straightened all the way and shot a very forceful glare in their general direction. "Fine," he said coldly, and went back to his seat.

Jounouchi knew this was as much a response to him as it was a general statement of his health, but it was bullshit on both levels. Kaiba obviously wasn't fine, _and_ he was sticking his nose into Jounouchi's business for no apparent reason.

Which meant it was obviously time to put that dent in his study wall.

-

Before Jounouchi could do this, however, he had to make it through the rest of the school day, which he managed to do with his brain more or less intact. Then he had to study at Yuugi's again, having of course promised them both Wednesday and Thursday, a trip which took a few hours out of his afternoon.

Then came the fight to scrounge up dinner, and after that he looked at his stack of homework on accident and realized how close it was to turning into a small book, despite all his previous work, and tackling some of that took a few _more_ hours.

So by the time Jounouchi finally got out to Kaiba's mansion it was almost midnight, and a lot of his irritation had unfortunately leaked away. He still had every intention of messing up Kaiba's wall, but he was resolved not to fight with him about what had gone down the night before, regardless of whether it needed to be fought about or not.

Besides, he wanted to know what Kaiba's plan for knocking himself out was.

The security guard at the gate shot him the weirdest in his series of looks yet, but thankfully let him in once again. "I guess you've got a lot of business with Kaiba-san?"

"Tons," Jounouchi assured him, and made his way to the front door.

Testing the handle first, he found it luckily open, and slipped inside and up the stairs as quietly as he could. The mansion, however, was utterly deserted, so quiet that his steps in the entrance hall echoed. He was glad when he at last hit the carpets in the hall upstairs, and further satisfied to see light under the study door.

It occurred to him briefly that Kaiba might have locked it to keep him out--but the front door had been open, so probably not. Rubbing his palms together, Jounouchi took a moment to fully appreciate what he was about to do, then grabbed the handle and heaved.

-

The plan almost worked.

Jounouchi's technique was perfect, and doubtless the door _would_ have ricocheted with a beautiful, damaging bang if Kaiba--that piece of _shit_--hadn't had the foresight to screw a stop onto the wall at some point within the last ten hours. This stop was furthermore rubber, and of some quality, and therefore resulted in the door not only refusing to make a satisfying noise, but also in it promptly bouncing closed again in Jounouchi's face.

Torn between admiration for Kaiba's sneakiness and the desire to break each of his fingers in multiple places, Jounouchi reopened the door with a slightly more measured hand, stepped inside, then slammed it closed with a graceful flick of his wrist.

"Do you _have_ to do that?" Kaiba muttered distractedly, barely glancing up from his desk as Jounouchi moved into the room proper. Every inch of the polished redwood surface was covered by notes, textbooks, coffee mugs, references...and also what looked suspiciously like a green bottle of premium sake.

"_Yes_," Jounouchi shot back, and, disbelieving, moved to pick it up. Turned out that it _was_ sake--Rihaku brand junmai ginjo, to be exact, freshly uncapped and still cold from the fridge. A perfectly circular ring of condensation shone on the surface of the desk in the empty space it left behind. "You're underage, asshole."

Kaiba took the bottle from him without a word, set it carefully back in its original place, and returned to his notes.

Jounouchi thought about this for a long second. Then he picked the bottle up again and sniffed it. Nice aroma; a little fruity, very pure. "I kind of figured you'd be able to afford, like, daiginjo or something. What's that really fancy shit?"

"Junmai daiginjo," Seto provided, and finally turned his chair toward Jounouchi, taking the bottle back once again and this time setting it on the floor behind him, out of Jounouchi's reach. "And I prefer this, thank you. A 10,000 yen bottle doesn't get the job done any better or faster than a 3,000, and while I may have more money than the emperor, I'm still not a _complete_ snob."

_Really?_ "Really?" And then as it occurred to him: "What job?"

Kaiba turned back to his homework. "Was there something you needed? You haven't started hallucinating again, have you?"

"_No_," Jounouchi replied sourly, slipping around to the brunet's other side to go after the bottle again. "What job?"

Kaiba grabbed it preemptively and hid it under the desk; Jounouchi would have to reach between his legs to get it this time. Not exactly the hot ticket. "Isn't it obvious?"

Jounouchi folded his arms over his chest challengingly. "Spell it out for me."

"Getting _drunk_, idiot," Kaiba gritted, glaring at him out of the corner of his eye. "Would you please leave now?"

"Fuck that," Jounouchi snapped dismissively, too disturbed on a whole number of really awful levels to get properly offended. "What the hell do you wanna get drunk for?"

Then the light finally clicked on. "Wh--wait a second, your fucking plan was to _actually_ knock yourself out? _Why?_"

For a moment Kaiba just stared at him, eyes wide. Then he shook his head, as though in the middle of witnessing something incredible. "_Because_," he said, very slowly and clearly, "alcohol is a _sedative_, and if I'm careful not to drink so much that I have to vomit it back up later, my chances of sleeping for more than two hours go from non-existent to excellent."

Oh.

That...sort of made sense.

The thing was, Jounouchi _hated_ drinking. He'd had friends as a kid whose dads were also alcoholics, friends who he'd gotten to watch cope through simple mimicry, turning into copies of the exact family they most hated, until they had become just another generation of bums ready to pass the legacy along. It made Jounouchi sick to his stomach, and more than that scared the shit out of him. His recurring nightmares were populated in large part by only a few images: Shizuka suffering, his mom leaving him behind again, and a thousand different ways he could, despite all his best efforts, turn out exactly like his old man.

Honda spent a lot of time telling him that he'd gotten kind of hyper-sensitive about the whole thing, which was probably true. He tried his best not to let it affect his reactions to other people's behavior--after all, there were thousands and thousands of people who were totally responsible about how much they drank--but somewhere he knew it was a prejudice he was never really going to shake.

But Jounouchi was also incredibly tired, and not precisely in his right mind anymore, and having now gone through the kind of drugged sleep Kaiba had criticized, he could kind of see why he was so disinclined to resort to that; and for all he hated the idea of alcohol and the reality of what it did to people, he _had_ drunk before without any real mishap. He never would have made it in the gang if he hadn't.

And he _liked_ sake.

"You think that'd work for me, too?"

-

So.

So.

So Kaiba was a really funny drunk.

Jounouchi didn't exactly remember when he'd ended up on the floor, but it was better anyway. Being on the floor, that was. The wood was really pleasant and cool against his cheek every time he turned his head to peer at the bastard, cool on his arms and his calves, and it was a nice color. Brown. But kind of red, too. _Really_ nice.

The sake bottles were, too. Jounouchi didn't quite remember when the second one had appeared, but he could figure that out later. They'd barely even dipped into it, so there was a nice double effect: green glass, green liquid, except it wasn't really green. It was clear, clear like water, like rain.

Kaiba had moved to the floor too, though in his case it was so he could pretend he was doing even more work. Maybe he _was_ doing even more work. He'd gotten more books out, at least, and they were everywhere, white pages and white notes, and Kaiba's shirt was white too, complimenting a floor that suddenly looked like the ocean, decorated with the pale crests of waves.

Maybe he'd had too much.

But wait. _Wait_. That was the point, right? Just so long as he didn't drink so much he was sick. He didn't think he had. He hadn't, right? "Right."

Kaiba made an inquisitive noise, glancing up from the page of notes he was in the middle of sloppily amending, his hand lifting with his head and maintaining its momentum, until the tip of his pencil ran into his knee. Perplexed, he turned his attention to that instead, and for several long seconds concentrated very hard on figuring out how it had happened. Then he gave up and looked back at Jounouchi. Maybe he'd had too much, too. "What?"

Jounouchi, however, was busy laughing, because obviously this was the funniest thing _ever_. "Your pencil."

"What?"

"_Your pencil_," Jounouchi shouted, accommodating.

Kaiba promptly threw said pencil at him, or tried to; it ended up hitting his stomach instead of his face, which Jounouchi guessed was what he'd actually been going for. "_My brother's sleeping!_" he shouted back, like this was the most important thing in the world. Then he turned sharply back to his notes.

Good thing he had his back braced on the desk. He probably would have tipped over if he hadn't. Jounouchi opened his mouth to inform Kaiba of this important fact, but Kaiba was right in the middle of staring at his hand, trying to figure out where the pencil he'd just thrown had gone.

"Hey," Jounouchi said. Something had just occurred to him.

"Fuck," Kaiba said quietly, still staring at his hand.

"_Hey_," Jounouchi said again. Kaiba turned to peer at him suspiciously. "_Hey_. Rihaku."

"Rihaku," Kaiba repeated slowly, still peering.

"Rihaku."

Kaiba lifted one eyebrow. "Rihaku."

"That's what I said!" Jounouchi shouted; then he remembered that somebody was sleeping--_Mokuba_ was sleeping--and floated one hand awkwardly before his face in apology. "Rihaku. What's that?"

"A poet," Kaiba said automatically, and promptly interrupted himself by shaking his head, face pinched up. A few seconds later he began again, speaking very, very precisely. "Li Bai. Chinese. He's a Chinese poet from the eighth century."

"Oh," Jounouchi said.

"He wrote poetry," Kaiba elaborated helpfully.

"Oh," Jounouchi agreed. Then he noticed his hand, which was still in front of his face. Unsure of what else to do with it, Jounouchi scrubbed it several times across his eyes and cheeks, wiping off the sweat that had built up, before he remembered that he could actually let it rest on the floor with the rest of his limbs. So he did that.

Kaiba looked distracted now, his face slack and far away. Suddenly he said very clearly, "But Du Fu is superior," and in a strong, measured voice began to recite:

"_Gems of dew wilt and wound the maple trees in the wood:  
From Wu mountains, from Wu gorges, the air blows desolate.  
The waves between the river banks merge in the seething sky,  
Clouds in the wind above the passes touch their shadows on the ground_."

The silence which followed this was so layered and complete that Jounouchi actually _heard_ it when he swallowed, trying to wet his dry mouth. Kaiba's expression had gone even more vague, and his tone was gentler when he added, almost like an afterthought:

"_Dew on the calyx chills the lotus, red with dropped pollen.  
Over the pass, all the way to the sky, a road for none but the birds.  
On rivers and lakes, to the ends of the earth, one old fisherman_."

"Cool," Jounouchi said loudly, then winced on his own behalf. Kaiba shot him a startled look, like he'd forgotten he was there. "You mem--memra--fuck. You _remembered_ all of that."

Kaiba nodded slowly. "For Gozaburo. Part of my classical languages." Then his face pinched back up. "I need a _pencil_."

"Dude," Jounouchi snorted, moving the hand to rest across the flat expanse of his stomach. "You threw it. At _me_."

"Good," Kaiba said, and hauled himself to his feet. A cascade of once-meticulously arranged pages dropped to the floor, white and grey in the low lamp light. Kaiba looked down at them in considerable distress. "_Fuck_."

Jounouchi knew in some now-tucked-away corner of his brain that laughing at him for that was mean. But it was tucked away, so he laughed as much as he wanted, closing his eyes. "Smooth, asshole."

Kaiba didn't reply. Unsteady footsteps made their way toward Jounouchi. Then something ran into his hip, hard.

"Ow," Jounouchi complained, but the word was drowned out by a solid thud right next to him. Kaiba had _tripped_ over him. Kaiba was lying face-down on the floor, unmoving, his shins resting across Jounouchi's pelvis.

"You did that on purpose," the brunet accused quietly, voice muffled by the wood.

"Fuck you! You're the one who tripped."

"You made me trip."

Jounouchi was far too drunk to be creative, and so settled for shouting, "Fuck you!" again, and punctuating it with a lot of indignant wriggling. "Get off!"

"You made me," Kaiba murmured again, but obligingly removed his legs, twisting his body sharply a few times, until he was lying at an acute angle to the blond. Glancing over, Jounouchi could see a fine layer of sweat shining on the curve of his shoulder, across his cheeks and nose and eyelids. It was too damn _hot_.

Wait--had he just passed out?

"Kaiba," Jounouchi prompted, kicking one of his legs lightly. "Wake up, jackass."

"I'm not _asleep_," Kaiba ground out, but didn't open his eyes. "You should go home."

"Why?"

"Because you _should_. Just go home, you idiot."

Jounouchi was _not_ getting up. "Fuck off. If I hurl, it's gonna be on _your_ floor."

That apparently got Kaiba's attention. Next thing Jounouchi knew, hands were appearing out of nowhere, grabbing him by the straps of his tank top and yanking his torso off the floor, shaking him. The CEO had gotten up, was leaning down to grab him, teeth bared in indignation. "You are _not_ going to hurl on my floor."

"Hey, _hey_--"

Panicked, the world spinning in every direction, Jounouchi kicked with both feet for the closest foreign body part, catching Kaiba's right knee and left shin at the same time, shoving them out from under him. He landed right on top of Jounouchi with a surprised cry, winding both of them in the process, and though he rolled off after only a second, it still took several deep, long gasps, and a lot of stomach grabbing, for Jounouchi to regulate his breathing again. Beside him he could hear Kaiba doing the same.

That _asshole_. Jounouchi rolled onto his side and punched him in the ribs, he hoped hard enough to bruise. "What the _fuck's_ the matter with you?"

"What's the matter with _you?_" Kaiba snarled back, and then he was right back at it, grabbing for Jounouchi's wrist with one hand and his shirt with the other. Jounouchi was ready this time, and elbowed back, rolling for leverage.

And the next thing he knew they were right in the middle of a rather dramatic wrestling match. For several long seconds Jounouchi was four years younger, back in the gang and fighting in some wet back alley to defend his or Hirutani's name, trying not to breathe in when his face got ground into the pavement--and then he smelled the wood floor, the soap on Kaiba's skin, felt the sake sloshing insanely around in his stomach, and knew he was, for all intents and purposes, safe. The tension had just broken. This had been inevitable, had been coming for days. Jounouchi didn't know how he knew, but he _knew_.

Not that they weren't actually fighting.

For all the ingenuity he'd shown in busting Jumpei's nose, Kaiba apparently lost it when stinking drunk, and managed to bloody half his knuckles on Jounouchi's teeth before the fight was even a quarter over. Calling on years of sophisticated experience, Jounouchi head butted back, catching him full in the nose and mouth with his crown and earning a muffled cry for his efforts. The shocking thing was how _strong_ Kaiba was; he didn't look it, but apparently every inch of those geek arms was pure, stringy muscle, and he was using each fiber he could dredge into action. But Jounouchi was no lightweight, he'd spent most of his adolescence beating the shit out of guys Kaiba's size, and--

--and Kaiba had a fucking erection.

Jounouchi was so utterly stunned by this discovery that he froze in the middle of throwing his first good punch, perched on top of the taller boy with one fist cocked, the other twisted up in his shirt.

Kaiba apparently could achieve utter fury and humiliation in one expression even with a bloody nose, and did just that for several seconds, staring up at him without comment. Then he tilted his head to one side and spat loudly. The spit was unsurprisingly also bloody, and left a red, foamy spot on the nice floor.

"Gross," Jounouchi said faintly, lowering his fist as an afterthought.

"I told you to _go home_," Kaiba said, low and sullen, propping himself slowly up on his elbows. He didn't try to dislodge Jounouchi, however.

This was...way too weird. This wasn't happening. This was a dream, another hallucination. Obviously. Jounouchi shook his head a few times wonderingly, breath stuttering in his chest.

And then he opened his mouth and asked, "Are you _gay?_" without a second thought, because he'd been wanting to ask it for years, and hadn't yet figured out how to work it into any of their encounters. Clearly this was the perfect opportunity.

More blood dripped out of Kaiba's nose. He sniffed once, loudly. Then he licked his lips, working his mouth to spit again. "Yes."

Just _yes_. Just like that. Like it had always been obvious, and it was exhausting to have to repeat it again. Or like he was exhausted with saying nothing for so long.

Of course, this wasn't exactly the most shocking revelation of Jounouchi's life, particularly not slobbering drunk--the guy wore a purple trench coat on his days off, for crying out loud--but the timing had his head spinning in circles. Or maybe that was just the drunk part. Anyway. The important question was, why fucking now? Why in the middle of what could only be classified generously as a really lame brawl?

Then Kaiba opened his mouth to reveal a neat line of red teeth, and asked in a voice as close to hesitation as Jounouchi had ever heard, "Are you?"

Okay--actually, _this_ was the most hysterical thing ever. Jounouchi burst out laughing before he could stop himself, shaking his head over and over. "Am I--am I _gay?_"

Kaiba stared at him quietly.

And then it wasn't funny at all. "Fuck, man. I _can't_ be."

The look on Kaiba's face could only be described as incredulity incarnate. "_What?_" Then, louder: "Why _not?_"

The list of reasons for _why not_ was in fact incredibly long, though what struck Jounouchi more than this was a sudden, total understanding of exactly how different his life was from Kaiba's. "Because Hirutani'd beat the _shit_ out of me."

Kaiba looked confused now as well as incredulous. "Who's Hirutani?"

Oh, fuck. Backtrack. "Nobody."

"Jounouchi--"

"He's fucking nobody, alright?" Jounouchi snapped, grabbing Kaiba by the shirt and shaking him a few times, desperate to get the point across. Kaiba had to understand how important it was that he _not know_ about Hirutani. He _had_ to.

Kaiba grabbed onto his wrists after a few seconds of this, squeezing them once with incredible force to stop him. "Alright, he's nobody. I get it."

But Jounouchi still didn't get it. He didn't get _anything_. The sake in his stomach felt like it was on fire, and the lump in Kaiba's pants was definitely still there, and he was so _tired_, he was so tired he couldn't _see_ straight, he was so tired his teeth ached, his eyes ached, his joints ached, everything ached--

Jounouchi dug the palms of both hands into his eyes, groaning in frustration. The world began to spin violently. For a second he thought he was finally passing out, but when he took his hands away he realized, no, Kaiba had just rolled them over.

Kaiba had rolled them over. Kaiba was on top of him, staring down, backlit in the dim light, red-rimmed eyes wide and staring.

"Kaiba," Jounouchi faltered, but didn't know what else to do with his name. His face was heating up, his ears burning.

"I understand you're not gay," Kaiba whispered, which was stupid because they were alone, but at the same time nice, because Jounouchi really didn't want to be talking about this. And there was a question in those creepy eyes. Jounouchi couldn't ignore it.

Jounouchi was frozen. He wasn't--he _wasn't_, but he'd always--he'd been curious before. Right before he'd fallen asleep sometimes, when he wasn't paying attention to what he was thinking about. When it couldn't hurt to think about it. Samurai had done it, right? And monks? It was in all the history. Sometimes it felt like the question was everywhere he looked.

"Well?" he demanded gruffly, speaking before he could get too scared. "Get it over with."

Kaiba's mouth opened a little, his expressing flattening with surprise.

Then he closed his eyes slowly, almost--relieved, thankful, his head dipping until his face came to rest against Jounouchi's neck, smearing blood in the sweat which had collected there. Jounouchi felt all of his muscles bunch up--the guy was _everywhere_, he could smell him and feel him across every inch of his body, his body was tingling--in preparation, felt a final choking thrill of panic, and then Kaiba's hips jumped once, twice, a third time; then began to thrust more or less rhythmically, his breathing speeding up.

Jounouchi was hard in less than a minute, and so dizzy he had to close his eyes. At a loss as to what else to do, he pushed back, pushed hard when Kaiba started to push hard, and it felt--really good, the friction from his pants pressing just right, and the resistance from Kaiba just right, and it kind of wasn't so much gay as it was the most mutual masturbation in the world, and that was--okay. He could handle that.

Time thinned out and suspended, got lost in the nice, simple motions of sex, the natural regulation of his breathing and the strange clarity of sound. Eventually it started to hurt a little too, the cloth burning as it stimulated, but that was fine. That was fine. It was better if this was difficult.

"Jounouchi," Kaiba panted quietly, his arms trembling. He was propped up on his elbows, Jounouchi thought. Trying not to crush him. He bit his lip as an excuse to not reply, turning his face away and swallowing hard once, twice.

He kind of lost track of Kaiba after a while, or at least lost track of precisely what was going on, because the world was just that small. There wasn't anything to pay attention to beyond the rocking of his body, and the sudden, overwhelming certainty that he was about five seconds away from losing it. He bit down on one of his wrists, head tipped back, and whined one long, strangled note as his body tightened up, tightened, then finally let go.

But even after he came he didn't quite pass out, didn't quite fall asleep. He just drifted on the edge of it, on the edge of awareness, detached from the sticky heat of Kaiba's body, from the misery of confusion.

He thought of clouds, fish in water, snow, of the sakura when they came down in April. He thought of when he'd been young, of Shizuka, of the way they'd swept sand into piles on the beach.

He thought of his hallucinations, of the things people had been saying to him all this time, of his tests, grades, of prokaryotes and viruses. He floated through all of it.

_You're scared--_

_He's gonna **eat** you--_

_Then fucking **do** it--_

_Prisons had walls, everybody knew that--he'd been to prisons, picked his dad up, he'd been in a juvenile correction facility for two days when he was thirteen, it was Hirutani who'd bailed him--_

_And then suddenly Jounouchi was fifteen. He could remember it clearly, as clearly as his life now, every detail, every smell, every sensation, except for the ones he couldn't bring back--but they weren't important, and Hirutani was there._

_"Okay," Hirutani said. "Let's go."_

_He'd managed to find the address of another fag in the neighborhood. Their specialty was extortion, of course, but Hirutani and a couple of the older guys had a special thing for fucking up homos, and the rest had to tag along if they were beating one up on the way to do something else. Jounouchi didn't like watching, but Hirutani wanted him there if things got rough. Nobody could punch like him._

_But things never got rough; these guys were just going about their business, trying to make it in this rat hole, just like the rest of them._

_Jounouchi was fifteen, and there was this new guy he was watching the shit get kicked out of, and this time they didn't just stop with beating him to a pulp, some of the guys yanked his pants off and banged him right there in the alley._

_Jounouchi wasn't the only one disgusted. Some of the other guys, the younger ones he got on with better, shook their heads and wandered to the mouth of the alley to keep an eye out with the regular watcher, so Jounouchi went with them--but he could still hear it, this kid screaming, crying for his parents, then just crying, crying and crying. He was Jounouchi's age, no older, but with none of his muscle, and these guys were seniors, some of them even nineteen, long out of high school, ronin. Hirutani called him back as the last one was finishing up. Wanted him to break his nose to finish things. Wanted to know if he wanted a turn._

_"No," Jounouchi said coldly, glaring; but he busted the kid's nose without a word, because he knew what they'd do to make up for it if he refused. He remembered being so, so grateful that the kid had his eyes closed, that he never saw his face, only heard a little of his voice. He was so ashamed he couldn't breathe._

_He spent that evening and the next few days puking up everything and anything he put in his mouth. When Hirutani asked, he lied and said he had a flu._

_But he never went with them again when he knew they were going after the homos; he came up with some of the lamest excuses of his life to get out of it, but he had to. Hirutani called him out on it eventually, called him a wuss, wanted to know if he was a homo too, and Jounouchi remembered shouting something hysterically, something like, "I fuck assholes up, 'tani--I don't really **fuck** them. It's sick, man!"_

_By that point he'd known Honda for a while, out in his other life where things were as easy as card games and new shoes. The brunet had been working on him for a while to get out. He thought maybe it was with that fight that he ultimately did._

-

Jounouchi _had_ to throw up.

The need was immediate and urgent. Lurching to his feet, the blond temporarily ignored his spinning head in favor of stumbling blindly and quickly out of the room (he _couldn't_ puke in here), down the dark hall, into the toilet room. He almost didn't make it, but then it was there, glorious white even in the shadows, and wonderfully, wonderfully cool against his forehead as he crouched and heaved.

He'd only been this drunk once before in his life, and had apparently had just enough time since then to forget that it could hurt this bad just to throw up after. It wasn't just his throat and his nose that burned, it was his _head_ too, aching and tender.

That and the split lip.

When had that happened?

Spitting, Jounouchi stood unsteadily, then caught sight of the sink and half collapsed across it. Turning the cold water on, he rinsed his mouth vigorously, scrubbed his face, brushed his bangs and the ends of his hair damp. Then he had the stupid idea of drinking some of the water _really fast_ to clear his throat, and within seconds was back on the floor, adding to his already generous contributions in the porcelain bowl.

Okay. No chugging anything for a while, water or otherwise. Duly noted.

Flushing delicately, Jounouchi returned to the sink to rinse again. This time he inspected his lip as well, probing carefully with his fingertips. It wasn't bad, all things considered, but it had opened in a couple places, each cut vaguely tooth-shaped. So somebody had tried to hit him in the mouth and done a really crappy job of it.

Kaiba had hit him in the mouth.

_Kaiba_ had _hit him in the mouth_.

And also they'd kind-of-but-not-quite jerked one another off. After Kaiba had hit him in the mouth.

Suddenly Jounouchi had to throw up again.

-

Ten minutes later he staggered back into the study, his teeth all but chattering with nerves. His stomach felt like it was rubbing against itself with every step, but he made his feet move anyway, and did his best not to think about his pants. All he could say was it was a damn good thing they were really faded; hopefully they wouldn't show the stain. Even if they did, chances were it would be faint enough that nobody would notice, at least before he got home and _burned them_.

Kaiba was awake, and probably had been since Jounouchi had torn ass out of the room. Completely expressionless, he was lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling, jogging one foot lightly. Then he caught sight of Jounouchi, and to all appearances stopped breathing.

Jounouchi braced himself. He took a deep breath. He took a look at the clock on the wall. It had been four hours since he'd first showed up. Another wave of nausea passed through him.

The stain on Kaiba's pants was a lot more obvious.

"Oh my _god_. Were you _possessed?_" Jounouchi shrieked, suddenly horrified, so horrified that he couldn't breathe. His head protested the noise, but he had to ask. "I--were _we_ possessed? Oh my _god_."

Kaiba might as well have died for all the reaction he was showing. His face was bone white, bloodless, his lips almost blue.

"Oh my god," Jounouchi said again, loudly; he wasn't exactly a spiritual guy, but some things were just too huge to shoulder alone. And then for good measure he added an even louder, "_Jesus_," because even if Shakyamuni wasn't listening, the Catholics by his apartment probably were.

Kaiba, however, was still not reacting. Jounouchi couldn't think of anything else to say; his head was an ocean of expletives and thick, strangling terror, and he _could not_ think of anything else to say.

Then Kaiba rolled very slowly onto his side, away from Jounouchi. He looked limp, washed out, like somebody had replaced all the curves of his body with paper and forgotten to fill it.

And then Jounouchi had one of those moments where a lot of information that had been building up in his head over time suddenly came together to form a larger picture. This usually happened to him long after this picture could be of any use--and true to form, it was the same this time.

All the staring, the reluctance to give direct answers to his questions, the bizarre excuses for things. The odd hesitancy. The unprecedented concern for his health.

Something was sitting on Jounouchi's lungs. He drew in a breath that seemed to go on and on, licked his lips, swallowed.

"God, Kaiba," he whispered, incredulous, "were you fucking hitting on me this whole time?"

_end five_

**end notes  
**- Okay, now the note on Obon (it's mentioned in the first chapter, but I figured it would be more helpful to discuss it here). Obon is a Buddhist ritual observance wherein it is believed that for three days the spirits of one's ancestors return to visit their descendants (the 13th, 14th, and 15th days of the seventh month in the lunar calendar, but most commonly celebrated today in August). It is traditional on the first night to light a fire outside of one's home to guide their way. Offerings are typically made at household altars. On the third day things end with a bang with the enactment of a huge festival (it also seems that in some places there are festivals every night, but I can't confirm that yet), usually called the lantern festival in the west, and very commonly shown in shoujo manga. Taiko drummers lead the Bon Odori, or lantern dance, which everybody is free to join, and at the end of the festival there are usually fireworks. The day after this is a horrible travel day in Japan, as many people then pack up to visit their ancestors' graves and leave offerings, as well as lanterns, to help guide them back (if you've ever seen it, the practice of floating a lit lantern down a river is also part of this, though these customs all vary depending on region).

- People _have_ died from sleep deprivation before. Scary, right?

- Sake is broken up into a very strict series of grades depending on the amount of polishing the rice has undergone, the amount of added distilled alcohol, and the amount of koji, but quite frankly, I don't think I could do half as good a job describing the complexities of sake brewing as John Gauntner does on his site Sake World: and thus I will direct you there. Suffice it to say that what Kaiba has bought is incredible fancy, just not as fancy as it could be.

- On a related note, Rihaku brand sake is brewed in Iruma-shi--Jounouchi's hometown in this fic. :)

- On another related note, Rihaku is in fact the Japanese name assigned to the Chinese poet Li Bai (701–762 C.E.). It is his contemporary Du Fu (712–770 C.E.), however, who Kaiba quotes. Both quotations are from his eight-section work Autumn Meditations, the first being the first half of the first section (ahaha), the second being the last half of section seven. Section four, however, is probably the most quoted in the States: "Well said Ch'ang-an looks like a chessboard: / A hundred years of the saddest news..." This particular translation was done by A. C. Graham, and was pulled from the Longman Anthology of World Literature v. B.


	6. Victory Banner

**Start Six  
_Victory Banner_**

Jounouchi had known this little girl when he was five.

She'd lived in the house a couple down from them in Iruma-shi. This had actually been some distance for him then, as they'd lived kind of on the edge of one of the suburbs, where little stretches of wilderness still separated most of the residences from one another. The lot they had lived on hadn't been large in and of itself, but the area had been nice, old pavement roads and a few tea fields scattered close by.

She'd been four and half, and considerably more precocious than him. While Jounouchi had been busy collecting grasshoppers and centipedes and moths, she'd been memorizing kanji and learning Korean, and since the first second of their acquaintance had never, _never_ been nice to him.

Her behavior had been downright confusing, as he never remembered doing anything particularly offensive to her, either at school or around their respective homes. She just took out an immediate and unpleasant grudge against him, wouldn't speak to him, called him names when she did speak to him, even hit him in the eye once for trying to speak to her.

Jounouchi had been the kind of kid who was sensitive about a thing for maybe three seconds--just long enough to figure out whether he owed anybody an apology--before descending into full-blown retaliation.

Their wars in hindsight were kind of cute, but at the time they'd been epic. He had dropped mud into her hair once from a tree; she got him back by climbing into his room through his window and scattering dirt all over his futon, which had been low on two levels (not only had he been forced to sleep on the floor that night, but his mother, who blamed him for it, yelled at him for _hours_).

Another time he snuck a caterpillar into her bento while she went to look at something with a friend. She got him back an hour later by shooting him with a thumbtack using what was admittedly a very sophisticated rubber band gun.

This manner of back-and-forth had gone on for the better part of a year, until Jounouchi, frustrated and unable to do anything better than her, finally went to ask his mom where he was messing up.

He still remembered the look on her face, the way she'd just stopped right in the middle of molding onigiri for his and Shizuka's lunch and stared at him. The way she'd smiled and said very, very slowly, "Katsuya-kun, she has a crush on you. Just apologize and ask if she wants to come flower viewing with us next week."

This sounded like good advice to Jounouchi, who was tired of trying to think of ways to be smarter than her when he obviously wasn't. So that evening he went by her house and apologized loudly, asked if she wanted to go flower viewing, and embellished on the original plan by kissing her. It seemed like the thing to do.

Then she slapped him and ran off crying, and Jounouchi decided to never listen to anything his mother said ever again.

But it turned out he'd just embarrassed her. The next day she came by twirling a short branch of white spiketail, red from the tips of her ears down to the collar of her dress, and said yes she would like to go very much thank you, and kissed him back.

So for three wonderful weeks Jounouchi had had a girlfriend, until they both decided it was too much trouble to be nice to one another all the time, and settled into a very comfortable friendship instead.

Jounouchi hadn't seen or spoken to her since his father had brought him to Domino. But occasionally, casually, he thought about her, a fixed part of some of his better memories.

At any other time in his life it would have brought him endless joy to think that he would one day have all the ammunition he needed to compare Kaiba to a four year old girl. Being an integral part of that ammunition, however, cast a considerable pall across that joy. In fact, it totally ruined the joke.

-

Jounouchi got out of the mansion without knocking anything over or hurling on something expensive, which he took to mean he was sobering up, hangover notwithstanding. He became more and more paranoid, however, the more people he passed, convinced that each and every one was taking a good, long look at his crotch, and somehow seeing both his and Kaiba's names floating there incriminatingly. But nobody stopped him, and he got back to his apartment complex without further molestation.

The power was out, overloaded by all the people in his building who owned air conditioners turning them on at more or less the same time. He actually appreciated this, as it meant there was an absolute minimum of light shining in his eyes, but it also made it slightly more difficult in his current state to navigate the stairs. He made it in the end, though.

His dad was snoring on the couch, but half-woke when Jounouchi stumbled in, opening one bloodshot eye to stare at him. "Burnin' the candle at both ends, kiddo?" he slurred.

Jounouchi waved one hand at him tiredly, shutting the door and kicking his shoes off. "Go back to sleep, old man."

Grumbling, his father closed the eye again, licked his lips a few times, and did precisely that.

Once inside his room, Jounouchi stood for a moment and watched the street lamp outside his window flicker epileptically. Apparently it wasn't on the same grid.

Then he realized he was in the wrong room and backtracked, wondering if he wasn't still more drunk than sober after all. The bathroom tiles, however, were wonderfully cold against his feet once he finally got there, as was the door against his forehead when he shut it and leaned against it.

Locking himself in then, Jounouchi stripped naked, dumped his clothes in the tub and turned the water on cold, then sat on the floor as he waited. When it was half full he shut the faucet off, climbed in, and spent a few moments stepping on his clothes over and over, pounding them flat in the water. Then he pulled the plug and let the water drain, wrung his pants and shirt and boxers out, and hung them over the rim of the tub to dry. That finished, he set it to fill again, and this time sat on the bottom with his feet under the flow while he waited.

The second his lower half had gone sufficiently numb, Jounouchi again turned the faucet off, got back out, and set about the task of vigorously scrubbing his whole body with just the cold water; his thighs, his feet, his chest, beneath his arms, the back of his neck, his face and ears. Retrieving the rinsing bowl by feel alone, Jounouchi lifted some water out of the tub to wash off, then got back in and chilled his body some more, covering his face with both hands and measuring his breathing through his nose.

He wasn't sure how long he sat there in the dark, listening to himself breathe and thinking of nothing, but by the time he dried off and went back into his room, dawn was approaching, a line of pale grey tracing across the sky outside his window. His dad was still asleep on the couch, so Jounouchi didn't hurry dressing, pulling on fresh boxers, two-day-old pants and a faded orange t-shirt that smelled mostly clean. His body had already begun to heat back up by the time he finished, the pleasant numbness from the bath dwindling like ice in the sun.

His head ached like a son of a bitch, but the nausea was gone now, and he was _hungry_, his stomach sore and his throat raw from all the vomiting. Rooting around the kitchen, he managed to scare up half a bag of wasabi mame and a jar with two pickled plums floating decrepitly at the bottom, but ended up putting those back in the fridge, not trusting them to sit well. The wasabi mame, however, he took his chances with, and crunched on a handful as he wandered around his room, dredging up an old backpack from his closet and throwing in his wallet, some textbooks, a pen, a few comics. Zipping it closed, Jounouchi then tossed it over one shoulder, retrieved his house key from the bathroom floor, let the water out of the tub, and left.

The sun was coming up by the time he made it to the train station, and just as he'd hoped, the old lady who sold hand-made paper lanterns at the corner across the street from it had returned this year. Undeterred by the hour, she was already spotting business people and housewives on early errands, hawking with an amazing, subtle ferocity.

Jounouchi bought one. She stared at him appraisingly as he asked, silent, then abruptly grinned and said cheerfully, "A quarter off the price for this lucky boy. Make sure you pray hard."

It took another half hour for the station to open, but Jounouchi was still grinning by the time he got on his train, lantern in hand and 500 yen poorer. Once settled, he turned to watch the sun climb through the windows across the aisle, hands crossed behind his head. He couldn't exactly remember how long it took to get from Domino to Iruma-shi, but he'd brought more than enough along to entertain himself, and if he was lucky he'd fall asleep on the way.

-

Only half-lucky in the end, Jounouchi again had to settle for simply drifting, losing all track of time as he cultivated this fitful partial-doze. The pain in his head faded oh-so-slowly to the background as he did, until it had at last morphed back into the comparatively simpler tension headache he'd been wrestling with for the last five days.

For a short, blissful period he was almost positive that he did actually slip under, the world going black around him, but almost immediately it seemed he was woken up by the train's arrival. He had to jump to get off at the right stop, before the doors could close on him, but he made it.

It took the entirety of the morning, and then the better part of the afternoon for Jounouchi to actually find the temple where his dad's family grave had been housed for literally generations, because he couldn't in the end remember the name of it, only a rough image of what it looked like and a faint sense of it being near the Kawagoe border.

This was where he screwed himself up, as it turned out that no, it was on the complete _opposite_ side of the city from Kawagoe. By the time he at last got there his feet were killing him, he was absolutely starving, and the lantern had almost been crushed twice by assholes who weren't looking where they were going. But he was there.

A monk caught sight of him as he was searching through the graves for his family's plot, and began to draw discreetly closer and closer, looking bemused. Finally Jounouchi bobbed his head at the guy awkwardly, unable to pretend he wasn't snooping any longer. "Afternoon."

"You're so early," the monk mused, wandering closer still. "Are you from Domino?"

...oh, _right_. Saitama prefecture celebrated Obon in August, not July. How had managed to forget that? "Uh, yeah."

"And even then you're early," the monk continued, stopping finally just a few graves away. "Your ancestors' spirits won't return until the day after tomorrow, you know."

Now _that_ Jounouchi did know. He shrugged lightly, switching his lantern from one hand to the other. "Figured I'd help out early this time. Um--do you know where the Jounouchi grave is?"

Smiling, the monk beckoned gently, and thankfully led him to the right spot without further comment before disappearing quietly into the temple proper. It wasn't quite as far out as Jounouchi remembered, but then, he'd been a lot smaller the last time he'd come.

The grave was in good shape. This wasn't surprising, as Jounouchi had kind of figured his mother would continue to visit throughout the years and keep it up, for appearance's sake if nothing else. She was colder than the ocean floor, but she'd known his dad well, and specifically known that he wouldn't have the presence of mind to do it on his own. Still; it was a huge relief to know that he wouldn't have to worry about running into her.

Setting the lantern down awkwardly on the grey ground stone with its long list of names, Jounouchi dropped his backpack on the gravel path and crouched down, wishing suddenly that he'd thought to bring more. He really _wasn't_ very spiritual, but all the same, he'd grown up doing this, listening to his parents work out the proper offerings every year.

And knowing Yuugi now, seeing everything he'd seen in all the years they'd been friends, he was more than ready to accept that there was stuff out there way bigger than him. If the cards could have a heart, after all, couldn't his ancestors' ghosts come back for a few days every year? It didn't sound unreasonable to him. And he _really_ didn't want to be a dick and rain on that parade for them. Three days a year wasn't exactly a lot of time.

"Young man."

Jounouchi turned, surprised, and found the same monk standing beside him again. "Yeah?"

The man smiled and held out a candle with one hand, a match with the other. "For when it gets dark."

"Oh!" Blushing, Jounouchi took them carefully in one hand, using the other to rub the back of his head sheepishly. "Man. Thanks a lot."

Ducking his own head in acknowledgement, the monk turned to go. "Of course. It would be useless if you didn't have something to light their way."

-

Jounouchi really sucked at thinking about things deeply.

Mostly this worked out pretty well form him, which was of course to say that it hadn't yet gotten him killed. In his world view, this naturally made total sense.

But in a situation like this--the kind that not only called for at least a little deep thought, but actually required it--Jounouchi sometimes felt like he had no feet. But he was very good at setting his mind to something if he wanted, and right now he _wanted_. He wanted this whole mess out of his hair, and if that meant he had sit still for a while and try to think it out, then lack of natural aptitude for thought notwithstanding, he would do it. He might end up sitting there until all his hair fell out, but he'd fucking _do_ it.

Unfortunately Jounouchi was too hungry to start thinking about anything right away, so first he hit up a mini-mart he'd passed a little while earlier, wolfed down as much cheap junk food as he could afford, then ran back and planted himself once more before the grave.

He'd taken the lantern with him, so first that had to be replaced. Then, though he figured sitting seiza would be more traditional, he didn't trust his legs to hold up for more than ten or twenty minutes without falling off from blood loss, and so had to work out a sort of semi-formal cross-legged position instead--which was, he reflected after some examination, kind of oddly Buddhist. But it worked, and Jounouchi settled down for his deep thoughts without further interruption.

And found there was nothing in his head. Nothing but white noise and a few drifting swear words he'd been hoping to work into future conversations with people who deserved to hear them, which really didn't help.

Irritated, Jounouchi closed his eyes and pushed his mind back to the night before; thought of the green sake bottle, the warm light in Kaiba's study, the dark wood, the asshole himself...

Then there was way too much in his head all at once, so much that for a second he was worried he would actually pass out right there. Backpedalling fast, he bit his lip and tried focusing on one fact at a time instead.

Kaiba was gay.

Okay. That worked to start.

So. Kaiba was gay, and apparently he'd been hoping that Jounouchi was too. Or at least that he'd be sympathetic. It was kind of hard to tell.

This at last brought a question onto the field (Jounouchi was distantly proud of himself for getting this far in a more or less rational manner): was _he_ gay?

Of course, his knee-jerk reaction to this was _no_, _hell_ no, but after the last few days he knew better. His dad was, after all, a drunk, and he knew a thing or two about the way it made people act; that the alcohol wasn't creating something unpleasant in a person, but rather making it possible for them to express unpleasant things they didn't have the courage or the inclination to express when they were sober. Drinking didn't _make_ people assholes, it just removed all the inhibitions they'd built up over time to prevent themselves from acting like assholes.

So, to be more balanced: no, Jounouchi _wasn't_ gay, but as his own unguarded mind had made him well-aware, he _was_ curious. If he was feeling really brave he'd even be able to admit that he'd been curious for years, but that was pushing it, even for deep thinking.

To be equally fair, however, he really hadn't been protesting just for shits and giggles. The fact of the matter was that if he started fucking around with guys just to fulfill that curiosity and word got around town, Hirutani would kill him. There was no question about that. He'd skipped out on the guy's gang twice--in a particularly dramatic and violent fashion the second time, he remembered admiringly--and right now the only thing keeping the tenuous truce between them was the fact that they both did their best not to run into one another. Jounouchi's acquaintances kept an ear to the ground and let him know roughly where he was going to emerge next, and when Jounouchi got itchy feet at night, he went to another neighborhood, well outside of the guy's space.

But that kind of behavior would be all the excuse Hirutani needed to finish what he'd started. The other factor holding him at bay was the scrap of respect he still maintained for Jounouchi as the best beater he'd ever had, and if the word homo ever got seriously connected to his name, that would go away like a rock in water.

Jounouchi had been waiting a lot of things out for the past three years, and putting up with living in Hirutani's center of activity was one of them. The second he graduated he had everything set up to move (he'd been saving up for it for _years_), but that was still eight months away, and eight months was more than enough time to get killed for being stupider than usual. Jounouchi hadn't survived these last eight years by making his back into a target for every passing threat to take shots at. (Not a lot, anyway.)

Kaiba, however, made things complicated. More complicated than Jounouchi could even fathom, actually. As much as he hated to admit it, the guy really was almost frighteningly powerful--and, more importantly, his place was outside of Hirutani's range. Jounouchi couldn't remember which gang had its stakes in that part of the metropolitan quarter this week, but the area had always been too hot for anybody to hold onto for long, and Kaiba had probably already worked out something indefinite with whoever the thug of the month was. He, after all, hadn't survived by being stupid _ever_.

So if he needed to get these bi-curious hiccups out of his system, Kaiba was almost exactly the perfect guy to do it with, so long as they were discreet about it.

Discretion, however, had never really been his strong point, and somebody _would_ notice if he started making frequent trips to visit the guy. It hadn't been suspicious with Yuugi because everybody knew what a puss he was, and all about Jounouchi's enduring quest to beat it out of him without actually beating him, but what the hell kind of business could he have on a regular basis in the freaking Kaiba mansion? No way would they believe he was studying with the guy.

But Jounouchi wasn't a coward. He'd risked death for a pair of _shoes_, for crying out loud. Wasn't this more important?

-

It got dark without him noticing for a while. When he finally did it was because his legs had just made it forcefully known to the rest of his body that they could apparently fall asleep in any position, seiza or otherwise, and would he please get up before they dropped off?

This led to some kind of embarrassing limping around the gravel that Jounouchi pretended he was utterly alone for, and pointedly refused to let himself check the temple to see if all the monks were standing outside and watching.

Once the worst of the pins and needles had receded, Jounouchi lit the candle, and with only a little awkward fiddling managed to get it into the lantern without lighting it on fire. That finished, he got it placed nicely on the grave, said something he hoped closely approximated a real prayer, and upon retrieving his backpack, made his way slowly back to the temple.

But it had apparently gotten much later than he'd expected, and the doors were closed. Heading to the mini-mart next, he at last located a clock, and found it was actually past ten (he'd been sitting there that long?), and the last train had gone by an hour ago.

Shit.

At a loss, Jounouchi went back to the temple, back to the grave, and stood watching the lantern glow quietly for a little while. Then, necessity being the mother of invention--or at least an excellent excuse for stupidity after the fact--Jounouchi curled up beside the lantern and tried to sleep right there, for once thankful that the night was warm. It was probably terrible, terrible luck, but he was supposed to be the guiding light, wasn't he? Couldn't hurt anyone if he slept a few hours while he was at it. If he could even get to sleep.

It smelled nice out here. Certainly way better than his apartment, and even better than the clean parts of Domino, where car exhaust and cigarette smoke and the stink of a metric ton of garbage building up behind the restaurants over the course of a full day tended to interrupt things.

And Jounouchi fell asleep.

Jounouchi fell asleep for almost exactly one hour. He would have slept much longer, too, but a new monk who was apparently having similar insomnia troubles chose eleven o'clock and Jounouchi's particular portion of the graveyard for a pre-midnight stroll, and upon discovering Jounouchi proceeded to wake him up by screaming for the whole world to hear about _exactly how he was disrespecting his ancestors right that very second_. And Jounouchi was mad, he was _furious_ that his first good hour of sleep in almost a week had been interrupted, so he ended up screaming back, and for a moment they both just stood there and shouted over one another, equally incensed.

Then it occurred to Jounouchi exactly how stupid this looked, and also that if he'd had any karma left, he'd probably just wasted it all. So he left. He may have flipped the monk off on the way, but then again, he may not have. The point was that he _left_.

The train station turned out to be considerably more sympathetic to his current plight, insofar as nobody came along and rolled him off the bench he eventually settled on. But whatever small miracle had allowed him to sleep on the grave, it had apparently abandoned him by now, and the dozing was once again all he could achieve. That was good enough for a few hours, though.

Jounouchi pulled himself back into full consciousness around five o'clock, got out his textbooks and crammed a little, then got out his comics and read even more, and by the time he'd worked his way through the last one, the trains had just started up again.

-

Jounouchi got back to Domino almost exactly twenty-four hours after he'd first left, backpack over both shoulders this time, and spent a lot of time on his walk home, slowing periodically to enjoy all the Obon decorations that had gone up in his absence: altars in the more traditional shops, strings and strings of lanterns in rich, saturated tones, and half the people in yukata already. A lot of the festivity died down as he approached his neighborhood, until it had all but disappeared, but there was still a holiday tingle in the air, twisting his stomach around and around.

Or maybe he was just hungry. Hard to tell.

When he got onto his floor of the apartment building, however, he was surprised to hear their apartment phone ringing, audible even from the stairs, and wondered who the fuck was calling him at eight thirty in the morning.

Dropping his bag once he got inside, Jounouchi grabbed the phone from the cradle and jammed it against his ear, then ran back to the genkan to kick his shoes off as an afterthought. "Yeah?"

_"Fuck you, Jounouchi!"_

Oh, that was Honda. "Hey, man. Shouldn't you be at school already?"

An inhuman noise reached him across the phone. _"School? **School?** What about school fucking **yesterday**, you jackass? Where the **fuck** have you been? I called like, twenty times last night, and I've been trying for the last half hour too--"_

Oh, god. His neighbors were going to _kill_ him.

_"--and Anzu's all ready to call the fucking **police**, you stupid--stupid--"_

"Honda," Jounouchi said intently, cutting him off. "Would you believe me if I said I was having a total identity meltdown?"

_"No,"_ Honda snorted. _"Don't try to change the subject, man, it's lame."_

"But I jerked off at the same time as another guy Thursday night! In the same room!"

This got a somewhat longer pause out of Honda. Then: _"So? You did that with me last month."_

"...really?"

_"Yeah, you'd just picked up that new porno, remember, and you said it was too pathetic to have to watch it on your own? Wait, you're not really having an identity crisis about that, are you?"_

"I guess not," Jounouchi admitted faintly, suddenly remembering this incident perfectly and wishing he didn't. Then he shook his head hard, trying to get himself back in order. "What were you calling for?"

_"Well, apart from trying to figure out whether you were **dead** or not, Yuugi wanted to know if you were gonna make it to the festival tonight."_

"Oh, fuck," Jounouchi hissed, slapping one hand over his eyes. "I forgot he asked. Um. Yeah? What time?"

_"I think we were just gonna leave from school. Change into our yukata there and all. Aren't you going today?"_

"...no. No, I'll just meet you guys at...fuck, third central park. Four o'clock. That work?"

_"Yeah,"_ Honda said slowly, and then asked in a much more serious tone, _"Hey, are you alright? You sound like shit. Didn't you get any sleep yet? You're not sick, are you?"_

"Couldn't say yet," Jounouchi laughed, only a little hysterically. "I'll see you guys later." Then he hung up before Honda could protest, unwilling to continue the conversation.

_Okay. Okay. Focus. Center. You're like a wheel, man. Fucking roll_. Jounouchi took a deep, calming breath, then went after the plums in the fridge to take the edge off his stomach. He hadn't eaten since last night.

It was just after he'd stuffed the second one in his mouth that someone knocked on the door.

"Oh, fuck me," Jounouchi mumbled around the plum, swallowing hard. Then he went to see who it was, hoping against hope that he didn't find his landlord there with an eviction notice for all the noise complaints.

But it was just Kogata, apparently fresh from a wholesome night of banging nameless businessmen. She was fully tricked out, skinny pants and tiny shirt and all, her lips coral pink and her nails done to match. She smiled brightly at him, cheeks dimpling. "Thought you might be up! You weren't home yesterday, I guess? I mean, your dad seemed kind of worried, he dropped by to see if you were with me. And then your phone was going for _hours_ while he was out. Figured I should check and see if you were back."

"Thanks," Jounouchi said lamely, then remembered a shred of his manners and asked, "Wanna come in, or does it stink too bad?"

She wrinkled her nose delicately. "You had better come over."

-

So Jounouchi went over, and consequently spent some time explaining his inexplicable trip to her while she stood at the stove and cooked with her long fake nails getting in the way. In the end this account essentially boiled down to, "I suddenly felt the burning need to go back home and rediscover my roots for no apparent reason whatsoever," but fortunately Kogata wasn't particularly intellectual, and seemed inclined to accept this without much incredulity.

"It's kind of funny that you went two days early," she reflected, stirring a bunch of eggs around with a chopstick, "but kind of cool too." Then she laughed cheerfully, sprinkling salt into the pan. "Maybe you're really a bodhisattva and your spirit called you back like that so you could do your duty uninterrupted!"

Jounouchi blinked at her, perplexed. "What, are you Buddhist?"

"Not really," she shrugged. "But my parents were very big on the Pure Land. I'm going to put cheese on these, okay?"

"Okay," Jounouchi agreed, and drummed his fingers on the coffee table a little. After a few more seconds, though, he couldn't keep his big mouth shut, and finally asked, "How do you tell if someone's a homo, Ko-chan?"

She turned to blink at him for that, obviously surprised, her pink mouth open a little. "Ah. Well." Then she closed her mouth and tilted her head, perplexed. "Let me think."

So she thought for a few seconds, turning back to the food. Jounouchi waited, enjoying the smell of the eggs and trying to keep his stomach from growling too loudly in anticipation.

"I guess..." she began at last, rattling the pan a little to knock stray pieces of egg back into the bottom: "I guess some of it's just a feeling, Jou-kun. Some of it's obvious, I mean--like, obviously if they're homos, they're not going to show a lot of interest in me, and of course they don't. But sometimes guys come into Hoshi _because_ they're homos, because they think if they sleep with one of us they won't be."

Her face fell a little, her stirring growing less vigorous. "It's really sad, actually. But as for how I tell whether a person definitely is or definitely isn't...well, I guess I can't. It's kind of limited thinking anyway, don't you think? I mean, I have to sleep with girls sometimes, and _I'm_ not a homo, but it doesn't really bother me."

Then she turned to peer at him curiously, flipping the burner off with a muted click of nails on metal. "Why do you ask? You think you might be or something?"

Jounouchi didn't know what to say to that. He settled for shrugging uncomfortably.

Thinking about this response for several more seconds, Kogata scraped the eggs onto two plates and set one before him, then handed him a fork and sat down. They began to eat in silence.

"Well," she said abruptly, smiling, "you could have sex with me if you wanted to. You know, to see. I wouldn't even charge you." Here her smile widened, teasing. "We could take a nice, long bath--" and she leaned toward him, lowering her voice to a little girl whisper, "--and I would even wash your back with my boobs! My customers say I'm getting really good at it."

Oh, _wow_. Jounouchi was incapable of responding to that at first, wide-eyed and doing his best not to stare at the breasts in question. Distantly he wondered why nobody seemed to have considered that he might have already slept with a girl at some point before this, which he had. Two, even. "Uh. Not to disrespect your boobs, Ko-chan, but your customers sound really weird."

She giggled loudly, sitting straight again. "I know, right? It's so stupid! I wonder who thought of it?"

The conversation moved on from there, Kogata wondering why he wasn't in school right now, if he'd gotten the day off, if he was getting any sleep at all, if he was going to go to the festival tonight.

Neither of them brought up the other part of her offer again. Jounouchi figured this answered his question pretty well.

-

Fortunately he'd had the presence of mind last year to hang his yukata up before it could get wrinkled on the floor, so it was actually in pretty good shape when he put it on that afternoon. It was incredibly cheap, but he liked the pattern (horizontal stripes in a whole lot of different greens--masculine, but not boring), and it fit well.

Later on, he wouldn't actually remember much of what happened while he was at the festival proper. He met up with Honda and Yuugi and Anzu in the park as promised, and they all wanted to know if he was alright, commented on how tired he looked--distantly he was grateful that his lip had at least gone down enough to slip past their notice--and made him promise he wouldn't skip out on the mock exams when they started Monday. He promised, did his best to pretend that he wasn't punch drunk off his feet, and settled in to enjoy the evening.

Anzu bought him watermelon when he whined enough, while Yuugi shouldered the burden of getting more substantial food for them. It was a little easier to act normal once he'd been well fed, and easier to follow the thread of the conversation as it morphed, to get back into his usual routine of running around like an idiot and trying everything.

"You sure you're alright?" Honda asked quietly at one point, speaking out of the side of his mouth as they watched Anzu trying to win a stuffed animal from a hoop game. Yuugi was too busy talking to himself at the moment to pay attention, smiling at something only he could see. "You look a bit better, but not much."

"Fine," Jounouchi replied, and was relieved when it came out sounding easy, natural. "Just been a rough week. I'm gonna fail the Center test, you know."

"You _wish_," Honda snorted. "You're just being lazy. We all know you're gonna pass once you actually start trying."

Jounouchi wished he could know it too, but grinned anyway. No need to spoil the moment.

They ran into Ryou eventually, and for a few hours he tagged along. Around sunset, however, he started to get twitchy, and Yuugi started to look really nervous, and shortly thereafter he gave a brief apology and bowed out, disappearing once more into the crowd, a hand clutched gently to his chest.

Jounouchi almost asked where he was going, but fortunately put two and two together right as he was opening his mouth, and promptly closed it again, glad for the millionth time that he didn't have to deal with negotiating between two planes of reality all the time.

They tried to make him dance the Bon Odori with them when the time came and the taiko drummers appeared, and Jounouchi in turn tried to do it some justice once he finally gave in, but he was uncoordinated even on good days, and considerably less than now. He managed to keep from tripping anybody else while he was at it, but it was a close thing, and for a while after Honda _would not_ stop laughing, which obviously meant he wanted to get the shit kicked out of him.

It was the fireworks that eventually interrupted their light brawl, plus Anzu kicking Jounouchi in the head and telling him to shut up and enjoy the pretty lights. So Jounouchi obligingly sat on the ground and did just that, staring up with the rest of the crowd and enjoying them very, very much.

Then suddenly it was way later than he'd thought it was, and he had to get home _fast_, before Hirutani got started for the night. They let him go without much protest, and he jogged most of the way back to his apartment, falling back in around midnight and finding it once again empty.

That was okay. He didn't want to deal with his dad tonight, anyway. Crawling into his room, Jounouchi hung his yukata back up in the closet, grabbed his dry boxers out of the bathroom and put them on, then found his last pair of less-than-three-days-old shorts and pulled those on as well. Finding a shirt was a lot harder, and prompted him at last to sweep all of his clothes into a big pile for washing in the morning. Good thing it would be Sunday.

In the last hour it had gotten, as impossible as it seemed, even hotter, which made him incredibly grateful for the clean muscle tee he at last managed to unearth from under his futon. It took him a while to figure out why this had happened, but when he glanced outside to see how far the moon had risen, it at last became apparent; the sky had clouded over. Shortly after this point his skin began to tingle, then his ears plugged up, and with some irritation he at last admitted that they were probably in for a rather spectacular thunderstorm.

With this in mind, Jounouchi made the possibly stupid decision to run out that night instead of the next morning for breakfast supplies. Hirutani probably wouldn't be on the move until two, and there was a 24-hour mini-mart a few blocks away that had already been hit two weeks ago. The chances of him returning to the same spot after such a short break were pretty slim.

Stuffing his wallet in his pocket, Jounouchi jogged out into the dark, grinning and waving at the people he recognized who were just getting back, most still dressed in their yukata and already complaining about the weather.

Half of the mini-mart's windows were patched over, giving it an even sadder look than normal, but the place still had its open sign out. He picked up some bread for toast and a small bag of rice, another jar of plums and some instant ramen, and threw a box of melon gum in for variety. He was familiar with the cashier, so they chatted briefly while his things were being rung up and bagged.

Emerging from the air-conditioned coolness of the store, Jounouchi began to sweat almost instantly as the muggy air of the outside rolled over him again. Glancing up, he found the sky still clouded over, and cracked his jaw once, trying to get his ears to pop.

Though he did his best not to, Jounouchi had only made it back onto the first of the two streets of apartment buildings which separated the mini-mart from his place before he gave up and broke into the gum, chewing on two of the little green balls at once and trying not to spill the rest when he lost his footing in the poor lighting.

It was halfway down this street that he finally spotted Kaiba on the other side, and promptly swallowed his gum.

_end six_

**end notes**  
- Spiketail (Kinofuji / _Stachyurus praecox_) is a flowering shrub with trailing branches which is native to Japan and the Himalayas. These branches produce buds during the winter, and during the late winter and early spring these become small, cascading bell-shaped flowers, very pale yellow-green in color. White spiketail as far as I can tell doesn't actually exist, making the girl's gift another improbability/impossibility. :)

- You'll get a note on bathing later, so for now let's just let it go.

- Hilariously enough, upon doing further research I have discovered that pickled plums are cited by some as a good cure for hangovers. I kind of like having Jounouchi not know and put them back, however. ;)

- I have tweaked the hell out Japan's train system here with reference to time (it closes around the right time, but it does NOT open as early as I needed it to for the purposes of this fic. So I fudged a little).

- Seiza is the traditional method of sitting whereby the legs are tucked neatly beneath the body. Rather uncomfortable to those who aren't used to sitting that way, as the entirety of your body weight is settled on your shins.

- You know, I'm sure I've mentioned the genkan before this chapter, but I forgot to make a note of it. Shame on me. The genkan is a small square of lowered floor space which surrounds/comprises the entryway of a house or apartment in Japan. This is where you take off your outside shoes and, if available, don house slippers. DO NOT exit the genkan without removing your shoes first. Bad form.

- Pure Land Buddhism (Jōdokyō, separated into the Jōdo Shū and Jōdo Shinshū splinter schools) is derived from Mahayana Buddhism, and was developed into a separate school in Japan's medieval period. In this practice it is believed that one can achieve a paradisiacal afterlife through reverence to the person of Amida Buddha (Amitābha, the Buddha of Infinite Light), who created his Pure Land (Sukhāvatī) after living many lives as a bodhisattva (an individual who has taken a vow of compassion binding him/her to the earth--that is, these individuals promise that, though they might reach enlightenment themselves, they will abstain from fully achieving nirvana until all human beings have similarly reached enlightenment. Interestingly, some people believe Jesus was a bodhisattva, but I digress...). Should you encounter an individual saying a nenbutsu (the chanted praise _Namu Amida Butsu_), chances are good that he/she belongs to the Pure Land Sect.

- Yay for forks?

- Let me please take this opportunity to stress that I do not necessarily share these characters' opinions regarding homosexuality. I cringe every time I type homo--okama--but--fuck, that's what Jounouchi would say, it just _is_, and I've written, like, a page-long note detailing my own perspective and how I'm consciously trying to make the characters think differently from me, but...it's a page-long note. It's _long_. So you'll have to look for it in the LJ notes instead, and if you don't give a damn either way, then more power to you. Just don't bitch to me about my apparent homophobia, please, or we'll all just have to assume you're really stupid and can't read. :)

- Also, welcome to Japan, where prostitutes/their customers have devised some of the most bizarre uses for breasts that I have ever, ever researched.

- Yukata = light summer kimono. Very, very commonly shown in manga.

- Mmmm. Marukawa melon gum. This is delicious, and also available for purchase in the States. I highly recommend it as the finest gum you will ever consume.


	7. Endless Knot

**Start Seven  
_Endless Knot_**

It took him a few seconds to figure out that he wasn't hallucinating again, that Kaiba was _actually standing there_, glaring at him and looking impossibly, impossibly awkward in this setting. At least he'd had the good sense not to wear anything fancy, just a tank top and casual shorts, but the stuff was still obviously in good condition, better than anyone who actually lived here could afford.

A brief flash of his last view of the guy shot through his brain, still lying silently on the floor in his study with his back turned, barely breathing. Jounouchi had stumbled out only a few seconds after his last major revelation, having realized that no matter how long he waited around, there was no way he was getting an explanation out of the older teen in that condition.

For a few ridiculous seconds Jounouchi wondered how it was that Kaiba had figured out where he lived, before he remembered that the guy knew everything, and had ways of figuring out those things that managed to slip through the cracks.

Which brought him to the more urgent point of what the hell he was doing here. Jounouchi had no idea how to go about answering that, but he _did_ know that he wanted him gone, _now_.

"Man," he hissed, jogging across the street with a series of quick side checks. It remained mercifully empty of spontaneously appearing gang members, but he was suspicious all the same, and completely unprepared to deal with this new problem. "You're going to get the _shit_ kicked out of you hanging around here, you know?"

"And whoever has the balls to go that far will really enjoy his next few years in prison," Kaiba replied tartly, but he kept his voice lowered as well, apparently picking up on some of Jounouchi's very real nervousness. "I came to apologize."

Jounouchi's brain screeched to a rapid halt. He froze up in the middle of walking, mouth open, and found then that this wasn't enough, that what this miracle really merited was a lot of really shocked _staring_. So he stared, and then when that had gone on for a few seconds he stared more. A cat jogged silently by, disappearing into the shadows of an alley.

Kaiba shifted from one foot to the other, expression sour. "That's a bit dramatic."

Oh, _please_. Jounouchi shook his head rapidly to clear it, and succeeded only in making himself dizzier. It occurred to him that somebody was playing a guitar at the next complex down with their window wide open, singing loudly into the night. And whoever he was, he really _sucked_. And the _song_ really sucked.

"_I'd believe in you over god  
It's almost here, right? It's just in front of us, right?  
we are not alone; we are not alone..._"

Trying to ignore it, Jounouchi stepped a little closer to Kaiba, shaking his head again. "What--what _exactly_ are you sorry for, Kaiba?"

"_In the darkness unacquainted with the twinkling of stars--_"

Kaiba was quiet for a few seconds, apparently searching for a good response.

"_The mere half-moon laughs--_"

"I...well, foremost for--"

"_YOU CAN CALL ME SCARECROW--_"

"Look, would you _shut up?_" Jounouchi yelled, twisting around in an effort to spot the asshole. He thought he recognized the voice, but it was hard to be certain at these decibels. "You're really screwing up my conversation here!"

A second passed. Then, "_Fuck you, Jounouchi!_" drifted back down the street. "_What the fuck are you doing outside **tonight**?_"

Oh, Sakaki. Of course. "Getting ready to kick your _ass_, you loser! You have cram school tomorrow! Go to sleep!"

"_I'm unwinding! Just 'cause you have no ear for music doesn't mean I--_"

Somebody in the building they were standing under opened their window all the way and leaned out. "Sakaki, would you listen to him for once and shut up? My girlfriend's really sick and you're _not helping!_"

"_That's 'cause you let her drink too much again, Kazuki!_" Sakaki shouted back. "_Have you tried vitamin drinks?_"

"I'm leaving now," Kaiba said pointedly.

"No you're not," Jounouchi snapped, pointing one finger at him outright. "Come on. We can talk at my place."

Kaiba looked doubtful. "Your father's apartment?"

"No," Jounouchi corrected, already turning to walk in the right direction, "_my_ apartment. I pay the fucking bills, don't I?"

"That's right," Kaiba mused quietly, following. "I forgot you were the lone paper boy in middle school."

"Best days of my life," Jounouchi shot back sarcastically. "Pick up the pace, would ya? I really wanna have all my teeth in the morning."

-

Jounouchi _really_ didn't want Kaiba to see his apartment.

But it wasn't exactly like he had a lot of options. Hirutani was prowling, everybody in the damn world was awake (and apparently chatty to boot), and that was all there was to it. They could either talk in private in his shit hole place, or they could stand on the street and risk not only a nice double-beating, but also eavesdropping from every available direction.

The electricity had gone out _again_ while he was at the mini-mart, the building dark and muggy as they navigated the stairs. Kaiba stumbled a few times, lacking Jounouchi's familiarity with the building's flaws, but always caught himself before the blond could turn around and say anything.

Reaching the proper floor at last, Jounouchi was surprised to see Kogata in the middle of unlocking her door, and for a second forgot all about Kaiba. "Ko-chan!" he called quietly, waving.

She turned, squinting through the dark at him. Then she grinned brightly, two rows of shiny white teeth appearing like a magic trick. "Hi, Jou-kun!"

"Hey," he laughed, jogging over to get a better look at her. "I didn't think you'd get in for another few hours. Everything alright?"

"Yeah, yeah," she affirmed, voice bright despite being lowered. "I just asked if I could go early since so many of the other girls showed up right after the festival finished." Then she frowned unhappily, jabbing him in the cheek with one long, perfect nail. "You look so tired! Didn't you sleep at all today?"

Jounouchi managed a weak laugh, shrugging. "Mock exams, you know? Not much else to do."

"Well, you could sleep at night and study during the day," she suggested, sticking her tongue out.

A floorboard creaked behind him. Jounouchi almost spun around to punch whoever was sneaking closer, but--no, it was just Kaiba. Kogata looked over his shoulder, her eyes widening. "Um. Hello?"

"Good evening," Kaiba said, tone monotonous, but more or less polite.

She grinned uncertainly, tilting her head at him. "But it's morning now. Who are you?"

"He's a guy I know from school, Ko-chan," Jounouchi said quickly, jumping in before Kaiba could make a total ass out of himself. "We were gonna study for a while."

"Oh!" she said, and opened her door without looking, directing a much friendlier smile in their direction. "I have some tea if you think it'd help. It's just bancha, but it's not that bad if you swallow fast."

Jounouchi shook his head, opening his own door and waving Kaiba into the genkan. "Thanks, but we're good. You see my old man around at all?"

"For a few minutes right before I left," she admitted, a little hesitant. "It was almost nine. He--um, was planning on a long night, I think he said."

"Good," Jounouchi breathed, relieved. At least they wouldn't have to worry about him bursting in. "Sleep tight, okay?"

"Mm-hm," she hummed, already closing her door. "Study hard!"

-

"I don't suppose _you_ have any tea?" Kaiba said doubtfully. He was staring at the filthy kitchen unit, the myriad scattered bottles.

Jounouchi wanted to punch him so hard his eyes popped out (what the hell had he been expecting, anyway?), but reigned in the impulse, kicking his shoes off and shutting the door quietly. "No," he replied shortly, and without looking around made a beeline for his room. "Come on, you'll suffocate out here. I got a window we can open."

Unfortunately the window was already open, and the temperature only slightly less ridiculous for it. He made a show of shutting the door after Kaiba all the same, dropping the bag on the floor and kicking some papers into a pile, then waving his guest elaborately into the cleared spot.

Kaiba actually sat seiza, the pretentious asshole. Jounouchi flopped backwards onto his futon and scratched his neck, glaring at him.

Well, no point in screwing around. "So. What were you apologizing for?"

For all that the surroundings seemed to be giving him hives, Kaiba nevertheless looked marginally more comfortable in this semi-private setting, expression fractionally less neurotic. "For taking advantage of the situation two nights ago."

That...made no sense. "What?"

"Two nights ago," Kaiba said impatiently. "When you were drunk. I took advantage of that."

Jounouchi gaped openly, sitting up out of his slouch so quickly that his back cracked. "What am I, _twelve?_" he demanded indignantly, pounding the futon with one fist for emphasis. "And you were drunk too!"

"Yes, I do remember," Kaiba said quietly.

Jounouchi gritted his teeth in irritation. "Then you should remember me fucking up your face, too. What, you think I couldn't defend myself from the scary CEO?"

"I don't think I could explain what I've been thinking so that _you_ could understand it," Kaiba sneered back. "But I _am_ sorry."

"There's nothing to be sorry for," Jounouchi protested, angry and inexplicably upset at the same time. "I mean--well, fuck, yes, you _should_ be sorry, but not because I was defenseless. 'Cause I _wasn't_. D'you think you like, stole my innocence or something?"

Kaiba just stared at him.

A really horrible thought consequently occurred to Jounouchi. "Oh my god. I didn't steal _yours_, did I?" Then, panicked: "We didn't even fuck!"

Whether this was true or not, it was apparently more than Kaiba was willing to sit through. He got up without a word and went for the door, all but storming out.

Except he couldn't, because Jounouchi had had the immense foresight to lock it as he was closing it, and subsequently had just enough time to get up and grab him before he could figure out where said lock was on the handle. "Wait, wait, wait--"

"You piece of _shit_--" Kaiba snarled loudly, twisting to elbow him.

Jounouchi slapped a hand over his mouth, gritting his teeth in agitation. "_Shut up!_ You idiot, it's one in the morning! I _do_ have neighbors, you know! Just calm down."

Kaiba struggled for another second, but quickly stilled, breathing fast but regular. After another few seconds he nodded sharply, and Jounouchi let him go, stepping warily back.

They were both quiet for a moment, staring at one another through the dark.

Jounouchi took a deep breath, smoothing his hands through his hair slowly. "Okay. Look. We should get a few things straight before you cut out."

"Agreed," Kaiba said quietly.

A soft electric whirr filled the air, followed abruptly by a flash from the overhead light. Another second, and the electricity came unceremoniously back on at last, the halogen flickering rapidly before settling down into a steady candescence.

Jounouchi winced, squinting against the brightness, and saw Kaiba doing the same. Irritated, he flicked that light off and went for his floor lamp instead, grateful when it actually worked, casting a ring of warm gold light across the ground.

"You know what?" Jounouchi reflected, staring at it. "I think we do need that tea."

-

Kogata had fortunately not gone to sleep yet, and wasn't irritated in the slightest when he dropped by to pick up some of the bancha. It was so cheap it was actually bagged, but it was better than nothing. She even let him borrow her kettle, as theirs tended to leak.

It was halfway through boiling the water that Jounouchi at last remembered the exact way his dad had broken the last of their mugs a week ago, before this whole insomnia thing had begun (shit, had it only been one week?), and stood for a moment in some consternation, trying to figure out how to work with this development.

As embarrassing as the solution he eventually came up with was, the look on Kaiba's face as he received his plastic rice bowl of tea more than made up for it.

"You've got to be kidding." It was probably a sign of how exhausted the brunet was that that came out sounding more amused than irritated.

Jounouchi gave him the lamest thumbs up in his repertoire, setting his own bowl on the floor beside his futon. "Drink up."

"I think I'll need a pot holder."

Turned out they both did, but Jounouchi had never bothered to pick any up, so he gave Kaiba their single dish towel and grabbed the rag he used to wipe down the counters for himself.

Then they sat and sipped for a while, enjoying it (or, from the look on Kaiba's face, enduring it) while it was still piping hot.

Then Jounouchi cleared his throat loudly, letting his bowl-bearing hand rest on one of his knees. "So let me try and figure this out."

Kaiba sipped his tea slowly, eyes lowered, and didn't respond.

Figuring that was good enough for permission, Jounouchi took a deep breath, and in his head tried to gather up everything that had happened all at once. "First thing: you're a homo."

Thunder rolled somewhere outside, quiet and distant. Kaiba stopped sipping his tea, face pinching slightly in consternation. "Do you have to start with that?"

"Well it's kinda the big thing, isn't it?" Jounouchi shot back defensively, frowning. "Anyway. Second thing: you--what, have a crush on me or something?"

Now Kaiba looked both irritated and embarrassed, ears going red in the faint light. "There is some attraction," he admitted through his teeth. "Though I'm at a loss as to _why_."

Though tempted to flip him off, Jounouchi held his finger in check, taking another sip of his tea instead. "Okay. So third: we kinda jacked one another off two nights ago after a whole bunch of time spent arguing under the thumb of what I now totally recognize as a shit ton of unresolved sexual tension on your part."

"Your eloquence is _astonishing_."

"You could help out here, you know!" Jounouchi snapped, and since his tea was now cool enough, threw the cleaning rag at him.

It missed, but Kaiba set his bowl down all the same, looking abruptly determined. "Fine. Fourth: a major factor influencing everything we've done these past few nights has been a mutual case of transient insomnia, possibly caused by this heat wave, but infuriatingly inexplicable in any capacity beyond simple conjecture."

"What you said," Jounouchi agreed, and wished somewhere in the back of his head that he'd been able to follow the last bit of that. "Um. Fifth. Um."

"You disappeared for a day," Kaiba supplied quietly. His expression changed subtly, though Jounouchi wasn't quite sure how. "Where were you?"

Jounouchi shifted uncomfortably, jogging one of his knees. "Iruma-shi."

"Iruma-shi?"

Oh, for crying out loud. "I was visiting our family grave, okay? Remember, Obon? That big festival that just wrapped up tonight?"

Kaiba looked perplexed. "But you visited two days early."

Why was that the first thing everybody said? "You too! What the _fuck_, man? What's wrong with doing it a little early?"

"What, apart from that completely defeating the purpose of structuring it as a three-day ritual?" Kaiba shook his head in wonder. "How is it that your stupidity keeps surprising me? Tell me, do you ever have trouble remembering to _breathe?_ Because certain species of birds--"

"Asshole," Jounouchi growled, speaking over him, "that is so _not_ the way to hit on someone."

This was apparently not the response Kaiba had been expecting, though he recovered from it quickly. "When did I ever indicate that I was hitting on you?"

And at this Jounouchi could only smile, picking up his bowl and taking a nice, long sip. Then he set it down again and leaned back on his hands. "So I knew this girl when I was five."

-

Six minutes later he finished his story and went for another sip, watching the older teen closely.

Kaiba was busy blinking, possibly still absorbing it. Then he shook his head and blinked some more. "Are you actually comparing me to a four year old girl?"

Jounouchi shrugged, amused and totally willing to show it. "What can I say? If the shoe fits, it fits. Don't fight it, man."

"But..." Kaiba began to protest, only to trail off.

Jounouchi, however, had had a lot of time to think about this by now (if two days counted as a lot of time), and was furthermore on a roll: "If you wanna know if I'm gonna kiss you, the answer's no. But I wouldn't mind giving that other stuff a shot without being totally smashed."

All the blood rushed out of Kaiba's face.

Yikes. "What?" Jounouchi demanded, a little alarmed. He'd never actually seen that happen so quickly. "_What?_"

"You're not gay," Kaiba said, completely toneless.

"Well, _no_," Jounouchi agreed, frowning. "But that doesn't mean I can't screw around with you if I feel like it. Bisexuals do it all the time without going all homo."

Kaiba's lips twitched fractionally. "What, screw around with me?"

Oops. "No, I meant--"

"I know what you meant."

Then Kaiba was quiet for a painfully long, horrible moment, staring at him discerningly, the color returning slowly to his face.

"I don't believe you," he said at last, very softly. "You're exhausted. We're both exhausted. You can't possibly make that kind of decision right now."

Jounouchi wanted to kick him and say something snotty about how he could if he fucking wanted to, but something told him that wouldn't really help. Instead he offered mildly, "You wanna know what I've been thinking about all this?"

Kaiba at last fell out of seiza, crossing his legs instead and frowning. "Enlighten me."

Jounouchi took a deep breath. "I figure it's the heart of things." And then when Kaiba looked nonplussed, he said the word again, louder and more clearly: "_Kokoro_, you idiot. The heart. It just occurred to me when I was trying to sleep this afternoon. I don't think it's a coincidence at all--I mean, all this shit happening around the holiday, instead of last week or last month or a year ago? I think it's all just part of the bigger picture. And looking at it that way, I figure, fuck, now's the time. So, what decision? It's just reality."

"That," Kaiba said coldly, "is _ridiculous_. You're telling me that you're actually willing to radically alter your whole concept of self because of that load of mystic _trash?_ Let's go back to me questioning your total stupidity, mutt--"

"How many times in the last few years have you pulled your Blue Eyes _exactly_ when you needed them, you prick?"

"Oh, spare me. I'm not going to have another argument predicated on your romantic delusions about magic."

"_How many times?_"

"It's a card game!" Kaiba burst out, slamming one of his fists into the ground in frustration. The tea bowls rattled dryly, but Jounouchi was too flustered to shush him. "That's all! I don't know why you idiots can't get that through your heads, why you're so _obsessed_ with conflating fantasy and reality--"

Jounouchi got up to pace, pointing at Kaiba as he interrupted: "Then how come Yuugi spends all that time talking to the spirit? Or Ryou? You know they're not crazy--well, Ryou might be, but Yuugi's not. And how'd _you_ fall into that coma, huh? You seem pretty healthy to me, except for the part where you're a total asshole about everything."

Kaiba's face was going white again. "That was a medical anomaly. It happens sometimes. It wasn't _magic_, it wasn't--"

But Jounouchi wasn't finished. "What about you winning that chess game with your step dad? The most important game of your whole life against a chess champ, and you won--"

"I cheated."

Stunned, Jounouchi stopped pacing.

Kaiba looked shocked, one of his hands jerking up a few inches before stopping abruptly, as though he wanted to cover his mouth.

"What?" Jounouchi said weakly.

Kaiba opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Closing it, he tried again, and finally repeated very quietly, almost gently, "I cheated. I was losing, so I cheated. It was our only chance to get out, but--you don't understand, I've never had any luck."

Jounouchi wasn't sure what made him say it. The words just fell into his mind and out of his mouth: "Maybe you're having some now."

And then, speaking more softly, watching as Kaiba's face went from shocked to frightened, "Maybe _I'm_ your luck."

-

It seemed safer after that to sit back down and just finish his tea. Kaiba seemed after a moment to have the same idea, but his hand shook when he picked his bowl back up, soft tremors that made the liquid splash softly against the side. Jounouchi pretended he didn't notice.

It felt like the silence went on forever, but it was only five minutes at best. Glancing at his alarm clock, Jounouchi found it wasn't even one thirty yet. The pressure in his ears had gotten worse, though. "You should probably crash here. We have an extra futon."

"Why?" Kaiba asked quietly.

Jounouchi rubbed one hand over his face tiredly, sick of dancing around the topic by this point. "'Cause there's gang shit going down tonight, and also you could get struck by fucking lightning? Not a great time to wander around."

Kaiba pressed his lips together, staring at the floor. "You worked for Hirutani, then?"

Jounouchi resisted the sudden urge to cover his face with his hands. "What, you actually looked him up?"

Kaiba nodded wordlessly.

Oh, well. Less to explain, then. "Yeah, I worked for him."

"What happened?"

He couldn't suppress a glare at that, climbing back to his feet slowly. "I got out. Are you gonna stay or not?"

After a second's hesitation Kaiba nodded again, though he looked irritated with himself.

Good. Let him stew for a while in the misery of being an inconsistent little turd. "Fine. You can take a bath if you want, but we don't have a stool, so you'll have to sit on the floor. There's not enough hot water for a tubful either, but you probably don't wanna steam anyway, right?"

"I think we've all steamed enough by now," Kaiba muttered, climbing to his feet as well. For a moment Jounouchi was disoriented, having forgotten temporarily how damn _tall_ he was. Then, looking as though it was costing him a lot more than just breath, Kaiba added quietly, "Thank you."

"Yeah, yeah," Jounouchi mumbled, and went to get the futon.

-

Kaiba emerged from the bathroom fifteen minutes later, damp-haired and grimacing at having had to put the same clothes back on. "I left the water."

How shockingly considerate. Jounouchi made a face at him, but ruined it by grinning at the same time. "Thanks, but I took one earlier."

"Fine," Kaiba muttered, and went back in. A second later Jounouchi could hear the tub draining. Shaking his head, he turned back to hauling the extra blanket into his room, and tossed it carelessly across the spare futon.

He'd debated for several minutes over whether it would be better to stick Kaiba in the living room or his own room, but in the end there was really only one option. His dad would freak out if he came home and found some strange guy sleeping on the couch, and that was all there was to it.

Plus Jounouchi was an opportunist, and if there was any chance of Kaiba pulling his head out if his ass sometime this night and being up for some action, he wanted to be ready.

So his room it was, which meant he also had to waste some time putting his papers into a couple of messy piles against one wall, along with his books and comics and backpack and school bag and shoes, and also the shopping bag from earlier. The pile of dirty clothes went into the little bit of empty space available at the foot of his futon, which at last cleared most of the floor for Kaiba, and even left a little space between their respective beds.

Kaiba walked back in as he was adjusting the blanket, and immediately raised one eyebrow very, very delicately at the setup. "You do realize we're not going to sleep?"

"'Cause I'm that irresistible?" Jounouchi prompted, grinning.

Kaiba glared, folding his arms across his chest. "Because of the insomnia. You said you _tried_ to sleep this afternoon?"

Jounouchi blushed in spite of himself, going to sit on his futon. "So it didn't work well right then. I managed to sleep for a little while last night, when I was at my family grave."

And at this even Kaiba, who so very rarely showed any range of expression outside of those encompassed under the general umbrellas of anger and rage, appeared horrified. "You slept on a _grave?_"

Groaning, Jounouchi flopped over backwards and pulled his pillow across his face. "Look, would you just turn the light off and shut up? You've gotta know how bad my head hurts."

Kaiba muttered something at that, but it was fortunately blocked out by the pillow. A second later Jounouchi heard the lamp click, then the quiet whisper of skin over cloth as Kaiba laid down.

Ten minutes passed. Then twenty, then a half hour, and Jounouchi was still awake. He took the pillow off his face eventually, but even then, lying there with one arm stretched out and his eyes closed, he couldn't fall asleep. Kaiba's breathing sounded regular enough, but Jounouchi somehow doubted he'd gone under either, and at the end of the half hour was rewarded with a very soft, very frustrated sigh, almost too quiet to catch.

"Want some gum?" he offered, eyes still closed. What the hell, right?

A second passed. Jounouchi glanced over and caught light glimmering off one of Kaiba's eyes, the teen's head tilted slightly toward him. "No. Thank you."

"It's melon," Jounouchi elaborated, on the off chance that this would tempt him.

"Are you even trying to sleep?"

"With all my fuckin' might," Jounouchi replied sincerely. "So I've been wondering about something."

Kaiba sighed loudly, but was then pointedly silent, giving Jounouchi permission to continue.

"Right. So I know you said a few days ago that you don't like to take sleeping pills or anything because they do weird shit to your body. But if that's your problem, why fuck around with drinking? I mean, it's kind of the same thing, right?"

It took Kaiba a moment to respond to this, though he eventually did, tiredly: "Did it ever occur to you that I just wanted to be drunk? This hasn't exactly been the best week of my life. I'll be the first to admit what a stupid idea it was, but I didn't act without reason."

Jounouchi didn't exactly like that response, but he had to admit, it was fair. Then he sighed and went to get some gum for himself, stepping over Kaiba's legs very, very carefully in both directions. Once back in bed, Jounouchi set about reducing the sweet to the most perfect series of bubbles in the world, and wondered whether it would be weird to take his shirt off. It was just too _hot_.

"You could choke on that in your sleep, you know," Kaiba informed him darkly.

Rolling his eyes, Jounouchi switched the gum to the other side of his mouth. "Thanks, mom." Then he swallowed it, adding as he did, "And I thought you were the one bitching about how we weren't going sleep? Thanks a lot for the jinx, by the way."

"Oh, right," Kaiba muttered sarcastically, "blame this on me."

"Well, it's your fault, isn't it?" Jounouchi shot back, rolling his head in the brunet's direction. "If we'd done things my way we would've jerked one another off forty minutes ago and probably been asleep by now!"

"I'm not _obligated_ to have sex with you just because you're suddenly feeling cooperative," Kaiba snapped. "And what the hell are you talking about?"

"Coming, you idiot! It makes you tired!"

Silence, complete and unbroken. Then Kaiba whispered, "_Endorphins_," like this was the answer to everything. "Of _course_."

"Right," Jounouchi agreed slowly. "Those. Are you gonna roll over here or not?"

-

It was raining.

It was raining, and somebody in the apartment next door was pounding on the wall.

"_Jou-kun!_" he heard faintly, and wondered if the world was actually conspiring to get him evicted, just for kicks. It was even the perfect weather for it now.

"_Jou-kun!_" said the voice again. Kogata's voice. "_Are you awake?_"

"Yeah," he shouted fuzzily, wishing he weren't. Somebody moved behind him. Oh, right. Kaiba. Well, good, he could wake up too. "You okay?" And then, just because he didn't quite trust that he wasn't crazy, "Is it raining?"

"_Um. Yes?_" she said, just as Kaiba mumbled crabbily behind him, "Are you _deaf?_"

"_Look_," Kogata continued, "_there's a giant spider in my bathroom. Would you mind? I'll cook breakfast for you and your friend!_"

Jounouchi pressed one hand over his still-closed eyes tiredly. "Is it moving around a lot? Could I sleep for another hour first?"

A pause followed this, until Kogata, obviously confused, at last called back

, "_But it's past ten!_"

This took a moment to sink in.

Then Jounouchi sat bolt upright, inadvertently upsetting the arm Kaiba had had around his waist and earning a hiss of displeasure. But that could wait.

Holding his eyes as wide as possible (which was hard, given that they felt _really_ swollen), Jounouchi looked out the window first, taking in the grey sky and the rain pouring down, the way the water was bouncing off the top of the street lamp in little white lines. His alarm clock came next, placing the exact time at ten thirteen with its obnoxious red numbers.

It was at this point that Jounouchi realized he was also pleasantly cool, his skin dry as opposed to dripping sweat. The humidity had broken with the storm, along with some of the heat. And they'd slept. For _seven hours_.

"You look ridiculous, you know."

Mouth open, Jounouchi turned to stare at Kaiba, and found him staring more or less blankly back. There was a slightly amused tilt to his mouth, however. "Kaiba, it's raining."

"Yes," Kaiba agreed slowly. "I can see that."

"And we fell asleep."

Finally Kaiba let the smirk show through a little, just at the corners of his eyes. "It would appear you had a good idea. For once."

"_Jou-kun?_"

Oh, right. Jounouchi turned to stare at the wall separating them, grinning already. "I'll be over in just a second!"

Jumping to his feet, Jounouchi zipped his pants up and began to look for his shirt, finding it on top of Kaiba's on the barely-touched second futon. "You a picky eater?"

"Not that I'm aware of," Kaiba replied, collecting his own shirt and sitting up to pull it over his head. "You do realize how silly this all is?"

"Yeah, yeah," Jounouchi laughed, waving one hand nebulously at the brunet's pessimism on his way to the door, almost giddy at the wonderful feeling of having _energy_ again. "We can fight it out later. Come on over once you're all tucked in, okay?"

"Alright," Kaiba said quietly, defeated.

"Oh," Jounouchi said quickly, pausing in the middle of shutting the door after himself to add, "and Kogata-chan's a hooker, so don't stare at her clothes. She'll think you're interested."

Closing the door on Kaiba's shocked expression, Jounouchi took a second to lean his forehead against it and be generally, abstractly grateful for everything, from the rain to his dirty laundry, then grinned again and went to trap a giant spider.

_end_

**end notes**  
- So, um. That really is the end, in case you were wondering. Plus the epilogue, of course. You'll get that tomorrow evening. :)

- Temporal faux pas! While I absolutely adore the Pillows' song Scarecrow (スケアクロウ) and further love the way it worked into this chapter, it is nevertheless the case that this fic was written as though it took place in the late '90s, and the Pillows, though together since 1989, didn't make Wake Up! Wake Up! Wake Up! (the album on which Scarecrow appears) until 2007. OOPS. :P

- Cram school: for people who need/like to study on their one day off in the week. (/harhar) Seriously, though. Cram schools run every day of the week, and are an option for students who feel they need to literally do some extra cramming to prepare for examinations. Jounouchi should almost certainly be enrolled in one, but obviously he's too poor for that.

- Vitamin drinks, aka genki (health) drinks, are medicinal tonics sold in convenience stores throughout Japan which, among other things, are reputed for their ability to cure hangovers, improve health, increase energy, and on and on. Featured humorously in CLAMP's XXXHolic, where our beloved alcohol-swilling Yuuko is seen in one chapter sending Watanuki out to retrieve one (incidentally, this is also a chapter where CLAMP self-references--as they are so very fond of doing--by sending Watanuki to the drug store Rikuo works at in Gohou Drug, but I really do digress).

- Bancha = lowest of the 22 grades of green tea. Very common and cheap. I'm convinced this is what's sold to us at Costco as Sencha, but as hilarious as that thought is, it's probably wrong.

- Kokoro = heart. However, that equation is only partially correct, insofar as kokoro has a much deeper significance than that. The character kokoro is used to accompany a wide variety of terms which denote emotion (though it doesn't often appear phonetically), giving it a considerably more complex meaning when it appears simply by itself. That is, it's not just heart, but literally the heart of things, or the heart of the matter, which is what Jounouchi's going for in his theory. There's also a Shinto dimension, but I won't get into that here.

- Bathing notes now! To paraphrase from a very helpful and succinct webpage (h t t p : / / w w w . j a p a n - g u i d e . c o m / e / e 2 0 0 2 . h t m l):

1. Rinse your body outside the bath tub with a washbowl  
2. Enter the tub (for soaking only).  
3. After soaking, leave the tub and clean your body with soap. Make sure that no soap gets into the bathing water.  
4. Once you've finished cleaning and have rinsed all the soap off your body, enter the bath tub once more for a final soaking.  
5. After leaving the tub, the water is usually left for the next member of the house.  
Jounouchi does things a little backwards when he washes his clothes in chapter six (that is, uses the bathtub for washing, which you're really not supposed to do, and also gets in for a little while before he's scrubbed), but I figure he's a little messed up at that point anyway, which would make a few fumbles of typical order not only understandable, but indicative of how freaked out he is. In this chapter we accordingly see Kaiba leaving the water for Jounouchi.

- Endorphins, which are of course the answer to everything, are, to quote the other evil empire (wikipedia), "...endogenous opioid polypeptide compounds. They are produced by the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus in vertebrates during strenuous exercise,[1] excitement, pain and orgasm,[2][3] and they resemble the opiates in their abilities to produce analgesia and a sense of well-being. Endorphins work as "natural pain relievers", whose effects may be enhanced by other medications." Significantly in the case of male orgasm, it is the release of endorphins that typically creates in a given subject a sense of well-being and often tiredness; this lasts for several minutes, and encourages sleep.


	8. White Conch Shell

**Start Epilogue**  
_**White Conch Shell**_

"You're certain this is everything?"

"_Yeah_," Jounouchi said loudly, rolling his eyes as he slung the second duffel strap around his shoulder. "You didn't think I had more, did you? I've been broke like, all my life, you know, plus--"

"Your father originally bought several of the remaining items," Seto finished, rolling his eyes in return. Honestly. "I remember. I simply find it hard to believe that the futon will be the biggest thing."

"Well, believe it," Jounouchi snorted rudely, hefting said futon onto his freer shoulder and straightening again. This had the effect of making him look something like an anemic fiddler crab, but Seto managed not to say as much. "No computer, no bath stool, the couch stays, the floor lamp folds, the dishes pack up easy inside shirts 'n shit, I already gave all my books to Honda 'cause we're studying together anyway...what else? I mean, you've been here enough to get the picture, genius."

"Spartan," Seto supplied helpfully, enjoying the way the double meaning would go right over Jounouchi's head. It was also an accurate description: the apartment had been threadbare before, but with the single bedroom empty and the whole thing cleaned from top to bottom, it looked all but unlived in, permanent stains and wall damage aside. "That's the word."

"Yeah, that," Jounouchi agreed, and had already started to move toward the door by the time he finally hesitated, narrowing his eyes suspiciously. Seto almost applauded. The blond really had gotten much better at discerning his tones in the last four months. "Damnit. I hate it when you do that."

Seto raised his eyebrows, smirking.

"_That_." Jounouchi was glaring now, eyes bright. The November light was weak, but Seto had no trouble discerning the expression. "That thing where you make fun of me and I don't even get it. Fuck. You asshole--I'm gonna spend all day thinking about that now. Grab the damn pillow."

"Of course," Seto returned obligingly, and collected--without commenting on its quality--Jounouchi's beaten, ugly pillow from the couch, where they had piled all of the blond's things prior to packing them in the duffels.

...well. Maybe he commented a little. "You do know that these can cause back problems if you don't maintain them regularly?"

"Do you ever think happy thoughts?" Jounouchi complained, making his way toward the door.

This was an interesting question. "A few times a month," Seto admitted, following after him. "They're very startling."

"I'll bet," Jounouchi mumbled, and headed out without so much as looking around one final time, reaching back without turning to lock the door by feel. Seto slipped quietly past him, into the hall, then stood and watched as he shut them out for good.

Jounouchi was for a moment utterly silent and still, staring at his fingers on the handle with his mouth pursed, saying nothing. Seto remained silent, giving him time to absorb the moment.

He murmured something eventually--it sounded like _finally_, but Seto couldn't be wholly sure--right before he straightened up again, turning toward the hall at large. "Hey, I'm leaving!"

Several returning muffled congratulations and well-wishes were shouted back from various apartments, punctuated by Kogata opening her door to reveal her small, pretty face. "You're still coming for dinner Tuesday, right?"

"Yeah, 'course," Jounouchi laughed. Cheerfully he grinned, and flashed an unashamedly cheesy peace sign in the air with his free hand. "Good luck with the cicadas, Ko-chan."

"Don't say that, Jou-kun, you'll make me cry," she pouted, and stepped back into her apartment without another word.

Seto shook his head in wonder. He'd only seen her a few times since that first night, but she never seemed to get any easier to understand. "She is..."

"Kinda bizarre," Jounouchi agreed, and for once Seto had to admit, he'd filled in the blank well. "Not like we aren't, man."

Seto shrugged philosophically, readjusting the strap of the second duffel he was carrying at the same time. "So long as you feel up to the confession. It must not be so lonely to speak for yourself after years of practice."

"Asshole," Jounouchi snorted, but let that end it, half-smiling this time as he went for the stairs. Seto again followed, trying not to smirk in reply.

-

"So anyway," the blond started halfway between floors, just a few moments later. "Since when did you like me?"

Seto had long ago given up thinking that Jounouchi would one day cease to find new ways to totally shock him. He still almost fell down the stairs. "You didn't think to ask that until _just now?_"

Jounouchi actually had the nerve to pout and look irritated at the same time. "Well, _yeah_. It wasn't important first off. One thing at a time."

"Sound logic for someone as incapable of multi-tasking as you," Seto drawled, temporarily distracted from coming up with a response that wasn't humiliating. Sometimes the idiot just made it too easy.

Jounouchi's ears reddened, but he managed to keep the rest of his composure, having unfortunately become somewhat more difficult to goad recently. "I know you're stalling, Kaiba. Just answer the damn question."

Seto, however, didn't have an answer. Not a good one, at least—the only thing in his head was _always_, and that was not only hyperbolic, but unacceptable.

It was still humiliating how clearly he remembered his first view of Jounouchi five years ago, crossing the campus in his first year of public middle school and seeing him in passing (he'd gone to a private institution the year before, but Gozaburo had transferred him as soon as the new year rolled around, displeased with the orphanage's choice of education for him). It was impossible _not_ to notice the mutt with that stupid hair, but for Seto at that age the attraction had been somewhat more...instinctual, he supposed.

He had been completely and utterly strange, new. Seto had wanted to talk to him desperately, to find out if he was worth knowing, believing already that he was, hoping that he would be able to have something in him that Gozaburo couldn't touch. By that point Seto had already realized that he would never be interested in girls, but this was the first opportunity he'd had in his peaking adolescence to search through a large, predominately fixed population of people his age who were, in essence, available. And Jounouchi had been the very first to catch his eye.

Then, three weeks into term, after days and days spent trying to work out a way to speak with him, Seto had actually overheard a conversation between the idiot and his idiot friend Honda, and been forced to instantly and painfully recognize that they were, in fact, just idiots. One of them simply happened to be far better looking than he had any right to be, to possess a charisma he had no business possessing.

It had been one of the most disappointing moments of his life. He wasn't quite sure what he had been expecting, but a thug had certainly not been at the top of the list. He had wanted...

...well, he had wanted someone all to himself, utterly dissociated from his new life as a Kaiba, something private to enjoy. Gozaburo couldn't go to school with him to monitor his every action, and he had still been little better than a child, willing to hope against all odds that he would one day find a person who was perfect for him, and for whom he could be perfect in return.

But the someone who just so happened to push all the right buttons in his head kept showing up to school with black eyes, and Seto was certain they'd never have anything in common. So he had retreated with his original good opinion, and damn Jounouchi anyway for not living up to any real standards, particularly Seto's. He would find somebody else.

Only there hadn't been anyone else. Nobody so immediately striking, and certainly nobody who continued to seem, in the most distant and frustrating manner, attractive. He felt in one sense extremely shallow for this, but in another inclined to be overly defensive; it certainly wasn't a _conscious_ choice, so how could it really be his fault if in the back of his mind he occasionally wondered what it would be like to forget his own standards, or if his fingertips sometimes tingled when Jounouchi was close? It was just autonomous nerves.

Seto, after all, had been only thirteen that first year. He'd had all the time in the world to be dissatisfied with his options, and plenty of reasons to believe every inconvenient crush could be accordingly crushed out of existence. Disdaining Jounouchi had not only been a matter of principle, but a logical move. Insulting him at every opportunity, deriding him; Jounouchi had deserved all of it, whether or not he was aware of this.

Then suddenly he was eighteen, and still nothing: no better match, no variety of choices, no perfect individual. It was the worst irony in the world that with literally every country open at his feet, only the most mediocre of mediocre classmates could ever take full prominence, no matter how many people he saw and examined within his many spheres of activity.

Probably the most insulting occurrence, however, came when Seto wasn't looking, as by some sort of miracle Jounouchi developed a conscience and shook all the gangster out of himself, leaving in its place the most bizarre combination of bravado and sweetness Seto had ever seen in a person. Something that was at last worth having.

And it was all untouchable. Jounouchi continued to live his very separate life, and Seto learned for the first time a lesson about burning bridges.

Worse still, Jounouchi kept improving with every year. It was offensive, this very obvious example of the world mocking him for his mistakes, making it impossible for him to ignore the blond even as he got farther and farther away, putting them in the same class in high school and totally removing them from one another's worlds. That whole group of idiots had always unwillingly caught his attention, in part because they _kept getting in his way_, but Mutou and Jounouchi forever the most, the one for his potential and skill and the other for...whatever the hell it was his subconscious continued to pick up on.

Sometimes he wished he could find Mutou's looks appealing instead of just silly, if only to spare himself the humiliation of tingling in the presence of the mutt, but fate had never favored him that way. As Gozaburo perfectly illustrated, he was simply not allowed to have a good thing without a whole host of flaws to accompany it.

"Kaiba?" Jounouchi said curiously. The sound of his feet on the stairs was very far away, as was his voice.

"Always," Kaiba murmured softly, thinking out loud, and instantly came back to himself to properly wish he hadn't just said that.

Jounouchi stopped a few steps below him, turning with his mouth stupidly open to stare. Seto's heart began to pound uncomfortably.

Then Jounouchi laughed, shaking his head. "You prick. You're messin' with me."

_No_. "Yes," Kaiba lied, and distantly wondered if he'd ever get the chance to approach that honestly.

Probably never.

-

_How did it happen?_

Seto had been asking that question for four months now.

Obviously there were the physical facts--they had been sleep deprived, they had been bored, they had been lonely, they had been drunk, and Seto, losing control in that single moment, had grasped an opportunity he had no right to. What confused him was the knowledge that he should have gotten nothing in the attempt, should only have been reminded of what he'd given up on all those years ago when he first wrote Jounouchi off.

But something had gone right. For just one second it had worked, worked in his favor.

He couldn't remember any other time in his life that had happened.

Sighing, Seto pressed both of his hands momentarily over his face, listening to the clock by the door tick, tick, tick quietly, listening to his breath puff against his skin. This was enough for several long seconds, until reality again began to press in around him, filling his head.

His head was always full, usually too much so. It occurred to him on occasion that he probably ought to have gone crazy by now, usually right before he remembered that he probably already was. He'd never had himself examined for a name to put to it, but this was more because it wasn't necessary than because he was afraid to do so. He had always known that he thought of things differently than the people around him; he simply had better things to do with his time than waste energy labeling the reason.

Tea. He needed a tea. Opening his eyes, Seto took in the sea of papers on his desk critically, working out how much he had left before he could sleep, how much could be put off until later. The clock when he turned to glance at it revealed the time as a little more than half past eleven, which meant the head housekeeper would still be available to brew a pot for him.

Seto considered this option. Then he got to his feet and headed silently downstairs. Tonight was a night for total self-sufficiency. He could torment his employees later.

The kitchen lights were so unpleasantly bright when he flipped them on that he immediately turned them back off, making his way in by feel and turning on the much weaker stove light instead. This was perfectly appropriate for his purposes, and allowed him to move fluidly around the cabinets and counters without concern for obstacles.

He could only turn off his mind for so long, however, and halfway through measuring the tea leaves, he again found himself returning to that same question: _how did it happen?_

It was more than simply physical.

No, that wasn't true--it was more than simply physical for _him_. He still had no idea exactly what the hell this was to Jounouchi. He'd looked back into the blond's past as much as he could, dug up his criminal records and his father's criminal records, discovered the separation of his parents, unearthed the various pieces of documentation which had accumulated throughout his life to mark him as the functioning individual Jounouchi Katsuya, birthdate January twenty fifth, but none of this addressed Seto's personal questions regarding his private interests.

What did he want? Jounouchi's exact interests as far as he had stated them out loud were simply to _screw around with him if he felt like it_, which was not only crude, but unfortunately ambiguous. After all, if this was entirely dependent on what Jounouchi felt like, what would happen when he _stopped_ feeling any interest? What were Seto's options? Did Jounouchi even care to leave him any?

And why the hell was this so complicated? Seto had never had trouble ordering his life before this point, even at the times when it had spun most drastically out of his control. He hadn't wanted his parents to die, but once they were dead, he had had the option and the inclination to reorder, reform his conceptions. When he had fallen into his new life as a Kaiba, the same options had been open to him.

But Jounouchi, like Gozaburo, was unpredictable. In fact, he was worse; Gozaburo at least had wanted only a few very clearly defined things from him. Jounouchi was a free radical, and potentially destructive. If Seto let him, he could ruin his life. Or he could improve it. It was unquantifiable, and that was unspeakably disturbing.

Seto bit his lip gently, narrowing his eyes against the steam which rose from his cup as he poured, nearly finished by this point. The tea was strong and black, slightly bitter, brewed precisely the way he liked it. He kept his housekeeper on hand in large part because she was the only one who had ever managed to perfectly replicate his technique for achieving this.

The problem, he decided as he watched the reflection of the stove light shiver across the surface of the liquid, was that this situation, which might have been acceptable had their entanglement remained entirely emotional, had gone far beyond that. He, in point of fact, had messed it up personally, and now it dominated everything, this strange impasse of bodies and unspoken intention.

Strictly speaking, their relationship was sexual, but they weren't _having sex_ in a true textbook sense. Jounouchi didn't want to go there yet, and Seto didn't want to be the one to bring it up, since obviously it was the idiot who was having the biggest problem to begin with. If it had looked like Jounouchi was working his way toward wanting to, Seto might not have even wasted the energy worrying, but in these four months nothing had changed. Things had neither progressed nor regressed from that night in the blond's old apartment, and Seto had no idea what to do with that. He wanted something that was apparently much more definite than what Jounouchi was at present comfortable with, and there was literally nothing he could say. Not yet.

His feet were pleasingly silent as he moved across the stone of the reception hall, covered with socks and carefully placed. When he was particularly bored he sometimes amused himself by gauging his ability to move around the entirety of the house--_mansion_, Jounouchi's voice reminded him softly, which Seto ignored--without sound, measuring his skill at rapid escape.

Seto had absolutely no interest in being loved. He wasn't even particularly invested in being liked. What he was afraid of was going unnoticed. Those two years in the orphanage had been slow torture, and a horrible, merciless reminder of how weak he really was.

Mokuba would have stood a much better chance of being adopted well if Seto hadn't refused to be separated from him, hadn't convinced him that they _couldn't_ be separated when he was still just young enough to believe him. They certainly could have. But Mokuba had been the last person in the world to know who he was, that he existed--and if he had gone, wouldn't it have been the same as ceasing to exist in the first place? He couldn't stomach it.

So he had ruined Mokuba's chances through his own selfishness. In a way he often felt that his treatment by Gozaburo had been only fair by comparison, a just conclusion to a painful series of personal humiliations and failures. It was at this point that he had come to rest everything on Mokuba; this moment when he had at last realized that he was not meant to exist for any other purpose. He was comparatively unimportant.

Did Jounouchi think he was important?

Would Jounouchi ever become interested in more than the safe satisfaction of an idle curiosity? They saw one another rarely for the sorts of things that were troubling him so deeply, only a few Saturday evenings every month, because Jounouchi worked and Seto worked, and they couldn't precisely speak to one another at school, and there was only so much time in the day. Two or three days a month was all they could really hope for as long as they were trying to keep this discreet. Apparently even to one another.

Seto wanted him there all the time. Seto hated him for being so damn hard to understand, and hated himself more for being even less consistent. He hated his body for the way it could want something so impossible. He hated how Jounouchi was still the first, last, and only.

Seto didn't know what to do. On the one hand, he abhorred inaction. On the other, this wasn't all his responsibility to work out.

Jounouchi saw him as a person. He didn't call him Kaiba-san, and when he did call him Kaiba, Seto knew that he wasn't thinking of his father, or of either of their legacies. He called him Kaiba because it was his name now, and because he was lazy and rude and didn't believe in using honorifics like he was supposed to nine times out of ten.

Jounouchi recognized that he was a human being. But Jounouchi was only human himself, and this was, ultimately, an all but insurmountable problem.

Back in his study, Seto looked at the papers on his desk for a long, long time, teacup warming his hand, reluctant to sit down. Then he sighed through his nose and began cleaning up, mind too thick with questions to be of any good.

He didn't know what to do.

-

Jounouchi showed up almost exactly twenty minutes later, just as Seto had finished clearing his desk of detritus and work for the future. The tea had lost most of its real heat in this time, and so didn't burn the hand he held it with as he was opening the door, standing in the dark hall in his socks and somehow knowing that this had been inevitable. That he'd been waiting.

"Did you forget it was Wednesday?" he began, flat and unamused. His lungs, as always, ached dully at the sight of the blond, a persistent discomfort. "Your natural aptitude for subtlety is astounding."

Jounouchi grinned broadly. For the hundredth time Seto found his eyes drawn fleetingly to his bottom row of teeth, where the left canine and lateral incisor were slightly crooked. To this day he couldn't determine whether this was from injury or the fault of genetics, but he had been noticing it for as long as he'd known the blond.

"You should ask how good I do sneaking up on people," said Jounouchi, and muscled his way in uninvited, kicking his beaten sneakers off in the genkan and immediately wiggling his right big toe free through a hole in his sock. There was also, Seto noted clinically, a hole in the top of his right shoe--or more precisely a neat slice, roughly the width of a knife blade, the edges dark with dirt. Seto wondered if he had a scar on his foot, tried to remember if he'd ever looked when he had the opportunity, and found he couldn't recall. This was frustrating.

Jounouchi was still talking. "See, I got stuck in this museum once a few years ago with this fucking zombie--well, he was a professor first, but then he went totally _nuts_, I dunno why--"

"Jounouchi," Seto interrupted, frowning down at him. Some of the grin faded from the blond's face. "Tell me why you're here. We're not repeating July, are we? Because I have to be up at five, and I know you have work to do."

For a second Jounouchi didn't move, just frowned at him and fidgeted. Then he said, "You got more tea?"

"It's cold now."

Jounouchi shrugged philosophically, moving around him in the direction of the kitchen. The false leather sleeves of his sports jacket made a soft, dry sound as they rubbed against the felt body of the garment. "You got a microwave."

"And you still have no taste," Seto replied, speeding up to pass around him silently. "I'll make a fresh pot."

It had gotten easier recently to pretend that he wasn't doing exactly what Jounouchi had hoped he would. That he wasn't getting easier to predict. It was too disturbing to think otherwise.

-

The second pot actually turned out a little better than the first, sharper and stronger, with greater depth of flavor. Jounouchi sniffed his cup appreciatively for a few seconds right after he got it, the steam building a fine, nearly invisible layer of moisture across the tip and bridge of his nose.

Seto looked away carefully, pouring his own cup.

"Okay," Jounouchi hummed behind him. "Study now."

Oh, wonderful. Frowning, Seto turned around to stare at him. "Because you have to disturb my private space on every visit?"

"Because I fucking hate these _lights_." Seto had turned on the overheads, despite his earlier disinclination to do so, figuring that the blond would have poorer night vision. Jounouchi wrinkled his nose, casting a sharp glare up at them. "Feels like they're gonna open a hole in my brain. We're going to your study."

Of course they were.

True to form, Jounouchi chose the bottom of the stairs to explain himself, speaking casually as they moved up the steps through the dark: "So here's the thing. I gave my old man the number to my new place in case there was like, a really huge emergency, right? And the asshole's been calling _every fucking hour_ since about five. Guess he didn't think I'd actually go."

There was a very easy and obvious solution to this. "Unplug your phone."

Jounouchi gave a short bark of humorless laughter, just loud enough to echo faintly around the large room. "Yeah, I did that. But it still--I dunno, it felt like a really bad way to start things."

The blond's feet, despite the near foot of difference between their heights, were almost twice as loud as Seto's as they passed down the hall toward the study. Absently he wondered if the younger man would ever remember how to walk without turning it into a challenge, and doubted it. "Why not bother one of your other idiot friends?"

The loud footsteps stopped. Seto paused, hand on the study door, and turned. In the dark Jounouchi was almost invisible, little more than a floating voice and a smear of barely-present, messy hair.

"You fucking know why, Kaiba," Jounouchi said quietly. "Don't be a shithead. Can I stay or not?"

Seto, in point of fact, knew exactly why. It was the same reason he never discussed Gozaburo with anybody, even Mokuba; because Mokuba had thankfully escaped the worst aspects of their stepfather's parenting (his _training_), and Seto didn't want to be the one to ruin that. Because it would be attention seeking, too much like self-pity, to take his problems to someone without that kind of baggage. Because he had a reputation to maintain, and it was only romantic to flash around your skeletons in books.

Jounouchi had come here because he knew, even without the details, that Seto knew all of this, and because he would neither have to explain more than the bare facts of his given situation, nor feel selfish for burdening someone else with his tragedies.

It was, Seto reflected, a very pathetic thing, one that made dogs out of both of them. He opened the door anyway, glaring, and walked in without a word, waiting for the sound of Jounouchi's graceless steps to follow him; which, after a few seconds, they inevitably did.

-

Jounouchi fell asleep in one of the armchairs roughly an hour later, his teacup empty on the desk next to Seto's.

Part of him was tired and angry that this had happened, frustrated that he wouldn't be able to rest now. The thought of Jounouchi being left alone with all of his work was too disturbing to allow him to retreat to either his own bed or sleep. Part of him was simply resigned.

Around one thirty Seto went out to the balcony to stare across the city, watching his breath cloud white in the dark and letting his mind briefly overflow. Occasionally he had to do this, just to keep the noise down, and it was easier in the cold. Then he went back inside and stared at Jounouchi for an even longer time, frowning.

Seto believed deeply in constancy, predictability, permanence, but he was painfully aware of how unrealistic these beliefs were. He understood very well the nature of transience; that this moment, this precise instant where he breathed and Jounouchi breathed, where he watched and Jounouchi slept, was fleeting, would be gone as soon as it arrived. He understood that this was true of all life.

But at the same time Seto wanted to remember everything, every second of meaning. So he stood and watched and didn't move, and the idiot slept with his mouth open, breathing loudly, oblivious to everything. These were the moments where he probably envied Jounouchi the most.

Seto didn't know what to do.

_end all_

**end notes**  
So. Um. The story doesn't really feel finished, does it? I was kind of profoundly unhappy when it came to me that this was the case--though that was maybe more because I'd been shotgunning writing it for over a week at that point, and 50k words is a _lot_ for 7-10 days, only to realize at the end of them that holy shit, all you've done is set yourself up for _another_ 50k.

You guessed it. Sequel. Can't yet say how many chapters it'll be (I'm thinking four, but four REALLY LONG ones--like, 10-15k a pop long), but the first one's done, as is the first quarter of the second, plus a lot of miscellanious scenes (app. 20k typed, not including the whole fucking notebook of additional material that I haven't yet had time to commit to pixel). I would like to be magical and say that I'll have it done within the next couple of months, but honestly, what with finals approaching and the following spring quarter being my last one before graduation? I'm not too hopeful for copius amounts of free time. Spring break ought to give me enough to reach the third chapter (unless lightning strikes, in which case yay), but for now it would be more honest of me to just be depressing and say yeah, summer.

Thank you all so much for reading, espcially **fanficlunatic234** , **JuniperP**, and **ahsie**, who stuck with it the whole way, **Shantih**, who left me a lot of nice _long_ reviews that, good god, used _actual quotes from the story to illustrate points_ (!!!), and **Nothing Gold**, who put it in her/his C2 community! I would like to include a heart here to express the depth of my affection, but the code is sadly unavailable. Pretend you can see it.

I honestly wasn't expecting very many people to read this in the first place, so almost 2,000 hits, thirty+ reviews, and an archiving have obviously been REALLY EXCITING. You guys have delivered sunshine into my life. :)


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